Member Poem

The poet is dead.

He is stabbed, gunned, choked.
He has drunk poison, jumped heights.

His poem, one could imagine,
sits alone in a cold cell
where readers come and go
to interrogate.

"What do you really
mean?" a reader asks.
The poem stays silent
for she is only to be read.

Then the reader looks her
in the eyes. Either she sees
a new world, or she sees the world
anew. If in the silence
the reader understands
the poem a tear might be shed
or a smile be painted.

The poet, then, lives on.