J.B. Hogan’s most recent poem to appear here was “Jim Finerty Died” (March 2019). 

No Metaphor
By J.B. Hogan

There’s no metaphor here,
no attempt at poetic music.
There’s no syllable count,
no rhyme scheme.
This is about loss and pain,
not beauty or art.
This is Van Morrison singing
everything you do reminds me of you—
pain and regret and wondering why.
It’s Bob Dylan in Ballad in Plain D
except there was no breakup just a break
and there are no similes, no alliteration
no poetry of lost souls, just a longing for
more time, another chance, a simple question:
why or better, why not?
Why not? A question repeated, redundant,
with a simple answer, the cliché of our time:
it is what it is.
And it is what it is and there’s
no way to make it different,
no way to change reality,
no way to talk it back into existence,
no way to make it into poetry,
no way.