one thousand poem children
one thousand poems has mine soul commissioned,
a thousand more neath stone vault doors do attend,
patiently waiting revisions, rescission, catch and release permission,
waiting room patients, looking to buy a more favorable diagnosistician
this prolificacy,
nether curse or blessing,
this profligacy,
poem children fathered by single mom mothered,
borne nightly in dreams borne
from the northern, the southern,
the brains twilighted hemispheres,
who coordinate, drawing deep,
consulting a bartender's manual
a creation guide of mixology,
'how to intoxicate the brain'
cheap gin, multi-generational scotch,
visionary vermouth, the reddened cassis of life,
memories in the white grapes of possibilities,
futures unrealized, colorful takes and retakes,
a directors bespoke make-believe tales,
impossibilities, divine and mundane,
all into one admixture into the venous cavities poured,
nerves to blood to consciousness,
courtesy of the ganglia
the brain stem transmits them
fully formed to my
good morning sunshine
cracked and dried lips for re-emission
nigh head upon the pillow,
the hair trigger,
my rapid eye heartbeats, each a demanding sweetheart,
some performed to a discordant metronome,
in a controlled rage, my mental waste,
eliminated
the residuals,
purified with language as the
orchestrator, debate moderator
dreams, once recoded, once accorded,
the disordering tempestuous,
neurons cease-to-fire,
now just words, just words, just womb excretions
did I admit to a thousand?
more like tens of ten,
one, two per eventide,
have washed ashore, for some thirty years recorded
my brain pixilated,
its big shot game controller,
demanding purchase of more;
more storage space, more games,
not admitting in advance,
that it filters blends, conflates and purges
by combining
psalms and ditties, infantile rhymes and
new vocabularies of human aging idiocies,
though newly acquired, immediately forgot,
so always room enough for
one more episode
I study the brain, I study sleep,
study living and dying occurring at
their point of intermediation,
dreams
*this more knowledge gives no relief,
it becomes this poem becoming,
testifying that I prosecute myself
based on the evidence,
and if insufficient,
dream up nascent visionaries
from places that come unlocked,
tales from the vault vivisected,
the proper verdict
assured
sixty six years
of accumulation,
and still know so little of
proper space utilization,
writing poems proper
but nightly come the dreams,
nightly comes the trial,
comes the judgements,
comes a man-made customized
whitewall tired judgement,
and to you
submitted for
judicial review
strange that each one of you
becomes, adopts, adapts my visage,
my words in you, reflected,
a jury of my peerage peers,
which is why my appeals are
always returned in the file labelled
"denial"
until the next nights dream