April is the cruelest month because it’s, among other things, poetry month. The problem with poetry is that those who fancy themselves poets generally aren’t, and most poetry is dense, hard to read, silly, corny or just long and boring.

And then there are the good poems– those muscular and beautiful pieces of writing that take you to a different place and act upon your nervous system in a way that your body does involuntary things when you read a good line. Go on. Think for a few seconds (minutes? hours? a small eternity?) and recall some set of words you know by heart. Ready?

Okay stop. I don’t even know why of all the topics I could be writing, ranting about, I went with poetry. I guess it’s because it’s the beginning of April and if you had a particularly demanding high school teacher, you, too, were probably the victim of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Then you had to endure reading all the interpretive texts making you feel like either it would have been more practical to have been born in 1922 or, let’s be honest, just be told right away that in order to understand that colossal work of poetry at age 17, you needed a large amount of context in European geopolitical conflict that you most definitely lack because you are going to a public high school in California and, like, you’re 17.

You may be entitled to some compensation.

Poetry is a product of its time. I can’t rememebr which stand-up comedian once said that poets are like stand-up comics but completely devoid of humor. (Was it Bill Burr? Probably. That’s the kind of asshole thing he’d say and he’d be right.)

Stand-up comics– the good ones, the ones who are so brave they can rise again from their own ashes after bombing and come back funnier and more incisive every time– are our philosophers and our jesters. They deliver punch after punch, truth after truth, but they are so kind and sacrificial that they make it funny. They cushion the blow so we can laugh it away if we wish. Laugh away. Forget. Just kidding. Not kidding.

But poetry takes a different approach. Poetry snatches the chicken wing out of your greedy little jaws and makes you think of smelly coops and of the dismembered little dinosaurs that grew up in cramped conditions– the ones you’re bilsfully eating.

Poetry is meant to shatter you, to make you vibrate with your whole being. Poetry is meant to encapsulate your horniest, most deviant thoughts and distill them into something that makes you forget that sex is a lot of weird positions, sweat, body odors, weird noises and strange smells.

Poetry is raw truth and it may look pansy and weird but if you let it –and if it’s good, really good– it will change your worldview. It will pull tears from where you thought there were none. It’ll push you to read more. To find out more. It will make you hungry.

Poetry is what makes people want to stand in a crowd and wave a really garish national symbol. Stripes? Yes! But also stars? I MEAN WHY NOT. BUT WE’RE GONNA DIE FOR IT BECAUSE SOME DUDE SAW THIS PIECE OF CLOTH IN TATTERS SOMEWHERE IN BALTIMORE AND HE WAS SO SCARED HE WROTE A FUCKING POEM ABOUT IT AND WE STILL LOVE IT.

Yep. See? you do know poetry. And it yet waves.