"hiccupped" poems
Do you see me?
I’ve been devouring poetry,
by the line,
by the page,
by the book.
No poem has been overlooked.
I’ve been feasting
on free verse,
blank verse,
perverse
cascades
of stanzas and rhymes,
a banquet of words
on which to dine.
I’ve been swallowing ad nauseam,
scarfing down similes,
masticating metaphors,
gormandizing poems aplenty.
Rhyming couplets,
I’ve contained them.
Sonnets and epics,
ingested.
Lyrical odes,
digested.
A thousand lines
to make you swoon.
I’ve tasted them all—
the potent and
the picayune.
Villanelles, check.
Sestinas too.
I even hiccupped
my own haiku:
Icicles melt on glazed gutters.
Water drips, prolific, bits of sunlit seeds
promising lilacs below the eaves.
Do you see me?
I hate to ask, but I’m afraid
something poetic has happened.
my head is a tureen
brimming with stars
my arms are utensils
in a darkened drawer
my chest, a room of last resort
my feet are stressed, in short
Such prosody is blinding.
Can you tell me why
my eyes are bleak?
Or why I no longer
blink?
I sense the sear of fluent tears
composing on my cheek:
endless drops, black beads,
consumptive stains of ink.
Oct 17, 2016
Oct 17, 2016 at 10:22 AM UTC
He wasn’t a flower
they were too exquisite. (although he wanted to be, so he could make people sneeze)
He wasn’t a cypress
they were too resilient. (otherwise he would have cracked the concrete)
He was born a ****
(A yard reckoning wild black mamba)
In the ground, he felt smothered,
digging to a world he never knew.
He was an anomaly
someone who no one desired to water.
He was a problem,
a pest,
something like
Fruit flies in a Florida summer
He was a stain,
a blood smear on an angel white Kleenex.
He was a pain,
a sturdy lump in her kidney the doctor had to explain.
He dug through boggy dirt,
carving away.
He dug through swampy mud
while the sky hiccupped tears,
constantly, continuously making
a path that he could climb.
He wanted—freedom
a love amongst the elegant lantana.
Jul 9, 2019
Jul 9, 2019 at 4:50 PM UTC