I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

If it were up to me, everything I love would have a poem and praise of it.

I mean everything.

Homemade chocolate cookies, park benches, sinuous roads beside city rivers, even to that clear plastic cap on a newly purchased

deodorant stick, that this morning I only figured out the best way to remove.

Turn the dowel. When poets undertake the mantle of Poeting, they inherit a set of unwritten yet embedded job descriptions.

Over and over again, they must show how one thing is like another.

Find new ways to describe the moon.

Write the epithelamia.

A wedding poem celebrating the coming together of a couple.

Pena sonnet that seeks to rival Shakespeare.

And delightantly they must pay tribute to ideas and objects that their eyes and hearts settle on,

especially the momentously underappreciated.

The more unnoticed, the greater our delight, like Pablo Nauruda elevating his socks.

Oaths shape a poet's attention into a formality of praise. The tone is one of celebratory reflection.

I'm given to such poems because even during moments of struggle, they raise my spirits. I take stock of the world as

poets guide me through the history and inner regions of objects in our lives. I dwell in the ecstatic as each poem models an

absorptive dive into the world of things. As a result, I see the good rather than the bad.

This has become, eventually, my natural response to life, all thanks to Odes.

Today's lyrical poem enlarges my perception of games,

how often what lies beneath coordinated play is a series of

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