An Ode to Jeff Bezos and Free Verse Poems

Or, Too Easy

“If people won't pay for our product, it's not a good enough product…
It would be like poetry without rhyming. It's too easy.”

- Jeff Bezos

And I wondered

at the ease with which Walt Whitman
must have penned “Leaves of Grass,” barely
even trying, I guess, or how simple
it must have been for William Carlos Williams
to depend on that red wheelbarrow, no effort
required, or how little thought Langston
Hughes must have needed to write,
”I, too, am America.” That’s only four
words, after all, and what rhymes
with America, anyway?

And of course “Caged Bird”
by Maya Angelou though that occasionally
rhymes, so not as easy.

And then there is John Blase’s Jubilee or
Kate Baer’s I Hope This Finds You Well or
Mary Oliver’s Devotions, books overflowing
with free verse,
far too easy.

Perhaps as easy, I’m guessing, as the movement
of the hummingbird as it hovers there gauging
the breeze and probing, or as easy as
the rose unfolding this morning
whose flowers I cut and
put in a vase on Maile’s desk before
the withering sun could come for them,
or as easy as the green grass which seems
to glow on these cool June
mornings, or as easy as the towering oak
in my backyard 100 years old
or more, somehow still standing
through all these storms, though many
have fallen around it,
how easy to just keep standing there,

and then I wondered if Jeff remembers
being little Jeff or Jeffrey or JP or whatever
name those who loved him called him,
and what it was like for him
as a child to step on a crisp spring morning
into a bookshop—does he remember?—
surrounded by all those
stories, the delight in finding something
new—has he forgotten?—being swept up
in another world yet again. They say
he loves books.

And if he does love books
and if he does remember those days,
how does it now feel to know
he has made an empire of bullying
bookshops and the people who pour
often their entire selves
into a business that will never
make them wealthy, at least not
financially. I think of
Byron and Beth Borger or my friends
who own Aaron’s Books or Pocket Books
or Warren Farha, God rest
his soul. It’s like picking on the weakest
kid in class, the one who looks different
or lives in a dumpy house, the one
who spends recess reading The Lord
of the Rings or maybe even T.S. Eliot’s
”The Waste Land”

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

(which is free verse, by the way, and way too
easy)

Imagine bullying that child, that weakest one
reading TS Eliot along the fence,
striking them in the face
while they read, knowing
they would never fight back,
because they’re not strong enough
or it’s simply not their temperament,
and then knuckles splitting skin,
even the unhinging of a jaw
or gentle snap of cartilage
around the nose, or maybe kicking
at them where they sit, breaking
ribs, the proverbial
kicking them while they’re down. Imagine
beating up a child, the one
at the edge of the schoolyard,
for loving books—

isn’t being a bully
far easier
than writing
a free verse poem
and sharing it with the world?

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