Imaginary blackbirds flitting to and fro
In my mind, the only place for my made up blackbirds to go.
Imaginary blackbird wings flutt’ring in my brain
Tell me vivid dream, why dost thou choose a blackbird here to feign?

Hung up on a Sunday with a strung-up savior
Hanging from a cross across the hall
Pleading that a deity annul her misbehavior-
Her previous activities, forestall.
Hung up on the hunger pains, insatiable and gnawing
Knowing well the vigor of the squall
Hung up on a strung up stranger, rendezvous withdrawing
Waiting on the King of Kings to call.

And I’ll swear by forty swords
If a sword is what will appease you
“SWORDS!” I’ll shout with mock obscenity, “Oh, swords!”
And you’ll wordlessly curse me through pinched eyes
And you’ll inform me that I am not a jester
And that you are not my mother, nor my caretaker.
But I swear, (swords!)
I swear that my mother has never hatefully condemned me for making light of a situation
Never folded her face into contorted revolt at my weak attempts to mend a fractured conversation.

And yet it seems as though I’ve prodded you with too many swords
You’ve plastered your negligible scars with bandages irrelevant–
Trivial, for though once wounds, they’ve since been healed.

Like a puppet master, like a ventriloquist
You’ve got me speaking in idioms

A foster home, I’ve adopted your character

And, doing so, determined your actions foolish
And you the fool and jester.

“Looking for a walking buddy”
The invitation looms as I scroll through pages of personal ads
Filled with sensitive insight, too intimate for idle voyeurs browsing.

The computer’s hypnotic glow, dousing my cheeks in pale light, coaxes me to search
To rummage through human advertisements and peruse desperate expositions
Behavior quite unlike the pastimes that others might imagine me participating in
Behavior quite unlike the nightly activities I usually partake in
Such as sleeping

Won’t I give up this useless quest for nothing in particular,
And surrender my body to the ruthless aches creeping into my muscles and joints?
I’ll wait for assurance that my grazing has meaning–
I’ll linger to assign significance to this arbitrary curiosity, even into the early morning
Eventually, I’ll resolve to the conclusion that there is somewhere an assembly of people squinting in thought, trying to justify this same bizarre inquisition

We the people, hunched over luminous monitors, “looking for something more”
We who have specific and lewd requests for the opposite ***
We nosing congregation, mysteriously drawn to the Strictly Platonic section of the personals
Should try our luck with a walking buddy
And wander away.

Cyclical desires baking, swelling in the swelter
Rotisserie ambition put to test by push and sway
Greasy golden goslings cooked a-wadd’ling from the shelter
Decisions made e’er quickly keep the wild world at bay

Gather round me, cursed patrons, I present to you a plague
Fare best served with murky water and descriptions best left vague
As a danger to ye all- I proffer cowards to depart-
There is peril in the air: A guise of parables and art.
Take heed now, sleuthing citizens, for clues lay all around
What drove the maddened cabin boy to run the ship aground?
Whose seductive fabrications made an honest man forswear?
Beware the pen and paper, there are clever souls out there.

Swift, teach us that a modest child will leisurely be milled
Eschewed from aid, withdrawn from conscious need
A child’s mind an empty bucket, waiting to be filled
And to earth’s throne, invalids will accede.

Longer than a person is typically comfortable with


Into another non sequitorial passage that leaves you bumbling
Words stumbling awkwardly off of the tip of your tongue clumsily
Out of your lungs tumbling past the ladder rungs you climbed to get yourself into the position you were in prior to

Falling

Rhyme scheme abandoned suddenly after the inspiration is lost and you find yourself having to inspect the far reaches of your mind for something that will fit into that empty, burning space on the page
Momentum
slows
as if the athlete in the run on sentence has broken his spirit
Deflated by ideal literary correctness and shards of cliche
The spirit in question is still “his” or “her”; not “they”

Flow like a river hand dug to meet the sea
Current pulling just as fiercely in every direction
Relentlessly displacing sand in hopes of repairing its barriers

Change prevention unsuccessful
You write a poem without a thesaurus
Late to work again

Once upon a lazing eve, there laid a twilight Queen
Whose every thought, with languor ease, on window ledge did glean.
Dreams soft with muted color, dreams of cloudy and opaque
The twilight Queen lay dreaming, half alive and wide awake.
Thoughts gathered on the bureau and took shapes of man and beast
A’thundering haphazardly like animals released
Dismantling the peace, piece by pieces of the night
Visions restless and unruly, hooligans cunning and sprite.
“Oh, what I’d give,” mused she, “if they absconded ‘fore tomorrow”
But to tame a thought, as stories go, wreaks pain and weary sorrow.
Ages passed in minutes’ span and she was not content
To slough away her slumb’ring hours with not a wink well spent.
And so, at midnight, to the dreams, her highness did bequest
Every single snooze thereafter, for one simple night of rest.

Stop writing poems about words
In darkness, scrawling notes that can’t wait till morning
Aspiring for perfection in seconds, in thirds
With embellishments, stop your adorning
Scribble on cards beside creaking beds
Gifts pushing through subconscious gray
Onto a pad once too new to embed
And tarnish with ink’s disarray
But write in the dark so each word ‘fore the last fades
Refine in the sunup of morrow
Immediate gain is pernicious charade
Leading only to anguish and sorrow