I try to write when I am tired
but tiny spiders descend around my desk.
Newly-hatched eight limbed-things
parasail
the silk lids over my eyes.
If only I could ride out the exhale and
go at once adrift, self-rappel
I would climb the silk suspension line
swing from thought to thought
thread the eye of the needle
pull-ey up the beanstalk.
but instead I'm left to watch these aerial yoginis
swim on a draft from the ceiling.
These spinsters with their poetic acrobatics
for whom rhythm is spun on silent trapeze--
make a play-swing
out of gravity.
The tiny spiders that descend around my desk
make me--an oaf.
a self-honoring monument
for climbing, a botched landmark to ---human ingenuity
me, a moving pedestal for dancing
me, a knotted up windsock
hunched over a heated screen,
trying to blow down metaphor, alliteration
from these tiny kites that ascend the earth.
Tiny spider, tiny spider
let down your silk tresses
draw up my mind
swing the high rafters
I want to hang upside down--
make a play-swing
out of gravity.
Yet when I pulled on the thread
to net the silken-mouthed beast,
words did not come down
like mana from heaven.
Rather, my tongue grew heavy with cotton
metaphor, alliteration,
the fabric of suspended poetry
unraveled.
Lucid improvisation fell like Icarus
to quips.
because thinking to write
and writing to think is like
pulling dead hair
from spaghetti.
Meanwhile, tiny spiders descend around my desk
parasail
and make a play-swing out of gravity.