"sestinas" poems
I used to have a thesaurus in place of my heart,
fifty-thousand words to say how I hoped
I would someday feel.
In place of love, I had a fountain pen with a bent nib.
Instead of kisses, I had wirebound sketchbooks.
While other girls, giggling, wrapped
phone cords around their fingers,
I wrapped sestinas in proper syllabics around enjambements.
tiny crushes were
replaced by Haiku gently
wafting on the page
Love sick sighs were ignored in an echoing of
alliteration and onomatopoeia,
and now I look at you and I rack my heart,
but I can't come up with the right . . . .
Mar 19, 2012
Mar 19, 2012 at 9:01 PM UTC
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