Tonight's Poet Corner: Quota

Quota
by Belinda Roddie

We often begin speeches with,
"As so and so once said," but
we do not tend to start
with something they did
not say. For we know that William

Shakespeare wrote "All the world's a stage,"
but he did not
say, "Two roads
diverged

in a yellow wood."
In the not-so-distant future,
the frothy intake of
quotable quotations
will be so unpurely
saturated that
we would rather belch out
alphabets for commencement addresses
than a notable frog's croaking. The word

notable
will cease to exist, for in an age
where art has no quota - canvases can shine
from every TV monitor and every
small compact miniature screen on a
pad tablet stone wax slab you scratch your
name and password into every day.
Poets will no longer be poets
because

poets have always
shared blood with
the obscure.
We bleed not for the ink
to glow, but for it to
spread outward

in thick, shiny puddles
that radiate the light of the
moon and cosmos and auroras
beaming down upon magnetic poles
and shifting the earth's axis
little by little
by little
until the pool stops spreading.

But stop the wound with a
flimsy piece of gauze
and you will notice
that the bloated bandage is awkwardly
saved in a drawer to be gazed upon
for some idle inspiration
when oration time comes.