It is actually all of the poems
other than this one
which have saved me—
those beautiful gems
wrought by hands I haven't met
with the blood and sweat
and fetid smell of their own
hells, or the sweet pure
simplicity of their daydreams,
bound and collected
by still yet unseen others—
those mystical squalls
of torrid imagination
which have snapped my last
resistant traces, or else
deftly recombobulated
some dead node in my mind
at the very last moment
before the breakage could occur.
Those are the poems
that matter. This one is written
merely in participation—
like a nod in response
to a life-and-death directive,
a sober and sapless 'amen'
uttered upon the conclusion of
a transformative sermon.