Poetry and About Poetry

Driveway Music On the asphalt, not far from the orange daylilies and the garden of bottlebrush bushes, azalea, and firecracker fern, the daily lies, wrapped in neat plastic, but soggy from a day’s rain seeping into a torn gap. That’s okay. The blossoms of death that litter the front page need watering too. It does little good to shake my head like an old donkey as I walk back to the house. The mist of lost lives does not dissipate like the morning fog from the garden. The bright flash of flower coloring the periphery of my focus does not pull me from black ink on stark newsprint. For this I spend nights weeding thoughts and images into words. In a journal, with an anachronistic pen and more stubbornness than courage, I nightly pour syllables into vases, called poems, hard attempts at sense and significance from diurnal clashes with all that is unpoetic: Unordered corpses, unspoken truths, unplanted seeds, uneaten meals, unwanted gestures, unfathomable strings of empty galaxies. As the ...

Driveway Music On the asphalt, not far from the orange daylilies and the garden of bottlebrush bushes, azalea, and firecracker fern, the daily lies, wrapped in neat plastic, but soggy from a day’s rain seeping into a torn gap. That’s okay. The blossoms of death that litter the front page need watering too. It does little good to shake my head like an old donkey as I walk back to the house. The mist of lost lives does not dissipate like the morning fog from the garden. The bright flash of flower coloring the periphery of my focus does not pull me from black ink on stark newsprint. For this I spend nights weeding thoughts and images into words. In a journal, with an anachronistic pen and more stubbornness than courage, I nightly pour syllables into vases, called poems, hard attempts at sense and significance from diurnal clashes with all that is unpoetic: Unordered corpses, unspoken truths, unplanted seeds, uneaten meals, unwanted gestures, unfathomable strings of empty galaxies. As the ...