If you sit alone in opaque rooms
and wait for a few good lines to inject themselves
into your brain as if they dripped from a syringe
then its time to try something else. Poetry is like
a gigantic exotic insect that shouldn't be squashed with the
***** undersides of rubber boots but captured
by meddlesome mesh nets and elbow grease,
put in display glass cases where the wild things
are and frequently washed clean of the stale,
insipid grime of life. And after enough love
it will entrap itself in the great transmutable cocoon of time
and break free. Poetry is in the bark of
old grandfather tree stumps out back behind
the barn, each circular line revealing
multitudes of cacophony and pain,
yet you wouldn't have known the taste
of the ligatures of wood without
first running your tongue along
the metallic axe that hued them. Poetry
hesitates for those who stare with naked eyes at the
cold quilt of patched grey clouds looking for symbols, choosing
to instead reveal itself to the telescopic lenses
of admirers of orbital spheres.
Whereas sometimes the cracking Sphinx confuses even the
pristine muses and the sound
of thunder at night makes the dog
cry so does the effervescent poetic
smiling of the moon inflict pain
onto the hearts of the lonely, yet they
still dare to look. Poetry isn't a noun
but a verb. It is the act of jumping
into leaves, of stepping off the precipice
of normalcy, of falling ever deeper
into the dark abyss below.