Why I Wish I Had Never Taken a Poetry Workshop

The ruined insistence of words inscribed In the flakes of rusted orb of day before my eyes Hang in time and dangle like in want of food infants From a caryatid's lustrous arms. There is no more

Hope for them than for the strange And wily whistling that one hears outside One's window late into the night and finally move rounds to see the whistler who disappears,

And takes the whistling, too, as if upon cue. Nevertheless, the features of the whistler progres In unremembered dreams which diminish by dint of half-lives. If I had single stood still,

Waited in the deliberate strangulation of schoolmarm Voices for the original word to sink, A watery diamond end a river of felled tree To sink itself into the suffocate in watered aviary

Of my brain, perhaps I would not have propp myself thus readily upon the lamp-lit discourse pillowing my head Into too abundant sleep. But alas, as is my habit, I sp past them like an ostrich, with wax wings

To make it worse, stumbling and sputtering Past the fleeting friction of seasons Until I liquefy ed and deformed into a warped Staircase wending its way up toward a fixed idea

That hung in vials of consecrated water from the necks Of the Eumenides masquerading as a haze If I could crumple all these meditations Into tiny balls of lead or leaves,

I would not be interested at all with finding Those fine balances ringed circular with shame Or pride, like an ovum reduced to cracking Because it cannot sustain itself level in the gentlest

Hand's stormy vise. on the contrary as I can fit My reflections into a coffee cup, What other can I do but use this lassitude As a scorn of the clear path's reflection

That enjoins me to forever walk upon sunny streams? Ever since I was a failed child, I've known in what way reveries can be shattered into signs That I will never call by dint of name,

How each man or woman can be worn Like a holster by dint of another man or woman's side. I did not ne to be reminded one time again, Did not need to hear,

"There's too plenteous glittering starlight here To diocese the glittering starlight." I was already blind to diamonds, and to stars, And the emptiness there was just exquisite

To my touch: single the Braille embossed across the fire That lit the coals beneath an ancient kettle whistling, Keening like an infant [i]or[/i] part of to the other a night so songless, And still the embers danced.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jul/Aug 1998

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