From the edge of decay
A brilliant return

The satisfaction I get
When I see the look on their faces
When children show me they can do something
That I just told them they're not capable of doing

Truly gifted poets
Straddle their crafts early on
Some even in adolescence
They have been cursed or blessed
To be kings and queens of utterance.
I never dreamed of becoming a poet
It was furthest from my mind
Then in a sudden twist of eardrum
It happened in my mid thirties.

Out of the recesses of Time
Came the lure and a hook
Shining in enchanted brook
And before i knew it
My heart was snatched
And my movements flustered
When i bit on ambrosiac bait
Drenched in Muse's wine
Drugged and drunk
On sounds and images
I struggled in a pool of words
To assemble what held me infused
To make sense of orphaned views
Swaying between shade and light
Like dancers deprived of audience.

My poetic rapture began
In frenetic rain of ink
preposterous in direction
A poetaster rapt on vapid rhymes
With sounds of poetic crimes
But my craft developed
In piecemeal fashion
And rendered my pen composed.

A minnow of long ago
Has grown into a mackerel
And longs to become a whale
In the ocean Ars Poetica
Though it seems a pipe dream.

she waits at the door
for him to come home.
it has been so long.
and yet
she keeps her post.

if she leaves for a second she might miss the flash of a uniform, a crooked grin, a letter home.
baby teeth knocked out like gravestones after a storm.

like the gravestone the telegram in her hand may imply.
she has not opened it.
she has not-
can not-
will not-
open it.

the telegram sits
and she sits
and the clock sits
(mockingly)

and her son sits.
the closest to his homeland he will ever get is
the flag blanketed over him.

and still

she waits at the door.