Launch Post - Should Birds Just be Birds?

I was reading "There Are Birds Here" by Jamaal May and I got to thinking about what the poem seems to be saying-- specifically, what it's suggesting about poetry. To me, it seems like the speaker is correcting certain interpretations others may have about poems (likely poems about Detroit).

More than once the speaker says "no" before explaining what an image actually is as opposed to a different metaphor. For example, "No, / I don't mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no / not the confetti / a tank can make of a building." The speaker is insisting on their own images, notably ones that are not necessarily connected to calamity, as with a tank leveling a building, or slavery, as with the cotton. When the speaker describes the neighborhood as "tattered and feathered / as anything else," it seems to me like they are choosing not to romanticize or overstate the images in the poem, keeping them more direct and concrete instead.

This all leads to my question: Would you agree with this idea that we should romanticize or even politicize images less in poetry? When is it okay to expand into metaphors and when should we keep things more down to earth?