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Nothing

"How can you write poetry?" he asked.
These days, I would have told him to
fuck off, tried to beat him to the insult,
but at the time I said, "What do you mean?"
"Poetry has to be about something," he said. "You aren’t about anything."
No one
is about anything and poetry
is always
about nothing.
The only reason we can say that
poetry isn’t a waste of time
is the fact
that everything else is.