dreams like this aren’t a dime a dozen
and maybe it’s just me but i have the sudden urge
to rip out that piggie bank my mother gave to me
when i was six years old and gut it
with every knife in my silverware drawer
or the hammer in her tool box,
whichever i manage to find first.
you taught me proper grammar and spelling
and while i’m pretty good at one, i still forget i before e
even though you spent a half an hour teaching the rhyme to me
when we were in fifth grade
and suddenly we’re getting spelling words like relief and believe
and achieve and even though i had to look up their spelling on dictionary.com,
five years later,
at least i’ve experienced them all,
at least i know all the blues of relief
and the reds of achieve
and every shade of yellow that colour in ‘belief’
like a stain glass window,
and i’m glad i know what inversion and parallelism are
because if i didn’t my poetry would sound like garbled half-english
when read aloud.
(as though it doesn’t already)
i’ve found that spelling errors are slightly easier to rectify
and god knows you gave me enough dictionaries as ******* christmas gifts.

all ideas are repeated until we have left seven entities
with their tentacles cut off but spices sprinkled on,
ready for consumption, and i’ve learned that innovation and originality
don’t come from new components,
they come from the new arrangement of old components,
so if i arranged the alphabet so u and i were together,
maybe we’d have a fairy tale or maybe it would be a horror story
or a crime thriller.
i’d dream up the ending because that’s my specialty
and you’ll read it like the loyal friend you are
despite my many, many, many, many spelling errors.