If you ask what a poem is about,
do not be surprised
to receive an answer like,
“it is about the spectral wind”
or “have you ever experienced
an autumn melancholy?
It very much like that
– but in boysenberry”
or maybe “it’s about two
and a quarter minutes”

for poets are a suspicious and cowardly lot,
ill-suited to describe their own art,
much as they love to speak of themselves
– for what subject should be a poet’s favorite but “me?”
A poet will want the work itself
to do the heavy lifting
of explication
and not require the poet to get any further involved.
Poets are lazy.
Poets are efficient.
Poets seek economy in language
and don’t wish to have to repeat
if it can be avoided.

Because poets wish to avoid
the redundancy of repetition
they’ll provide some dumbass answer
to get you annoyed enough
to leave them alone
so you will have to dig deeper
to understand their work.
Or maybe they don’t really understand
what they did at all.

I can’t tell you how often that is the case
for some poets.