We don't write poetry.
It happens.
It hits you in the face and
demands to be.

Its pieces bombard like pebbles
thrown by zealous winds.
It wakes you at two a.m.
frantic to be free.

Like soul longing for body
it floats about
filled with anguish
and yearning.

The world is a poem.
Walking among its words,
often unaware,
we breathe the empty spaces.

We are all scribes,
sometimes setting down
a verse or two.

But...

we don't write poetry.

It happens.

When sleeping poets do dream
Do they dream at certain times
the same dreams as us, you, or I
Long love dreams without an end

Spiders winding and toads weaving
Tiny cockle shells or huge daffodils
Cold hearts melted or fried ones too
Loves not gone the other way again

Falling off, falling in, falling down
Purpled eyed women and wiggly men
Nightmares arriving never in time
Time speeding up to stand still again

Summer nights in dripping red clouds
Rain falling up or tasting sour winds
Chased once around the world twice
Losing anyway the long way back in

Winning big green coins for jumping
slow trains to nowhere, now there anywhere,
and everywhere not here,
running on tilted electrified blue time

Inhaling the soft touch of perfect love
including all the ugly ingrown warts
Coughing up butterflies into the pool
with the squishy muddy zombie eyes

Echoes heard louder with both eyes
Coloring skies without knowing why
Flights to there with wings of flame
Swallowing rainbows to taste the gold

Colors amongst us walking, talking
Phantasmal fast riding beasts
sinuously moaning oh white *******
drifting with silver temptation winds

Tripping over sounds under tall feet
blowing them in retort not too,
but three, five and one dime more
Fantastical things, ordinary for all

Then perhaps, they maybe dream
Mostly all the same as us, you or I
Of course, that may mean, we,
Could someday be real poets, three

Yet we know the biggest difference
Between a real poet or not, must be
not so much in sleeping dreams
but in those precious awakening dreams

©  2017 Jim Davis

Poets twist, flip, and stretch words

Into an airy jumbled kind of order

Writing with exquisitely fine care

Love in all zillion brilliant colors

Bringing life to big splashes seen

Hate shown in some deviled words

Oozing, drying, dying, real blood-spill

Arranging letters, phrases, sounds

To flow like ancient fine wines

Scrumptious laid in clear outlines

Feast for all hungry searching souls

Starving for any old spirit's lifeline

Giving a little delicate morsel of

Help for loved, lost, ripped and torn

Wringing out kinda new thoughts

From nothing as it seems to some

A mortal mind's stir of hazed ideas

Attempting match of a holy's divine

Wishing a part of life to live forever

Thought of in worlds not thine own

However, all must truly truly know

The secret of a dead poet's words

Is a twisting of a simple mind into

Strange or loose shapes and forms

Leaving space for a bigger space

To hold a guiding little white light

Gift of clearing sight for the blind

©  2017 Jim Davis