Pooh-Bear Bard

Hard to write because the kitty’s on me.

Yesterday, I needed a photo of a poet reading,
so I made an effigy

using a big orange Pooh-bear
with a mic slung up to his reading
mouth. I tried different dark glasses on him,

a black sock for a beret. It was an elegy
for the whole ursid race he was reading.
He was the effigy

of seriousness itself, entelechy
realized in the charismatic act of reading
(with just a whiff of beatnic ennui).

I marvelled at how free
he was of the usual defects of reading:
words flying from his page like a kitty jumping off me,

he seized and owned that basement space completely,
even though he was just reading
from a book—only an effigy
in a poem that I wrote with a kitty on me.