Venn Diagram

Imagine an immense circle of all the poems ever written,

intersected with a smaller circle of people

inclined to read poetry,

the points that would represent my writing

would be too small to be rendered at this scale.

But there would still be points of mine

in that lens shape between circle A and circle B.

And then there would be an immense amount of pointless space.

Putting it another way,

imagine I were a market gardener.

There would be an immense amount of compost,

the unread words tossed on a heap.

But in raising poems,

the cost of seed and soil is remarkably low,

and the time, well, time is another of those things

you can’t take with you.

Many might find it odd that I would write so many words,

the market for the kind I write being what it is,

yet I find curious satisfaction

in composing thoughts

that will be left to decompose.

You are looking at the harvest.

And now I imagine your wry grin,

your non-existent self,

in an infinite universe in which I turn out to be mistaken,

not no one not reading these very words.

This is how we all live, after all.

I, your pointless unpublished poet,

imagined that it was so,

the Venn diagram and all

and that we are

what we are,

and who,

and why

not that any of it would stop me from thinking what follows,

after all,

and I smiled my own wry grin,

as I left a sack of zucchini on your doorstep

and I walked away.

Who but a writer uses words

like doorstep,

anyway?