To a Muse (Even If You Don’t Exist)

If you were my muse, then I have failed you.
Even if you weren’t, it seems I’ve dropped the ball.
If I was your poet, apology’s due,
since yours was never my story at all.

But you’re ever in my mind, even now,
when I have no thoughts left to inspire me.
There’s no sense in giving you a reason how,
since at last count I think it required three.

See, this so-called poet has lost his way,
the words, like crumbs some damn birds have eaten.
Your inspiration I’d die to display,
but the losses have left me sore beaten.

And so I offer another prayer,
on wings of this imaginary dove.
Please reach out and let me know that you care;
nowhere will you need to use the word “Love.”

Love’s a construct lonely poets devised,
It’s Obsession drives their creative time.
Their made-up stories often go unrevised,
though some I’ll share, even if they’re in rhyme.

That’s the problem and sin today I share,
with any who’ve fancied themselves my muse.
I’ve run bone dry of what my soul laid bare,
and beg your kind indulgence without excuse.

My empty soul no more can work alone,
I need your whispered aid, if you’re listening.
A note would be enough, who needs a phone?
Once more, my writership you’d be christ’ning.

If you don’t care, then that’ll be the end.
Who cares if some hack writer goes unread?
But if you care for the man, once your friend,
please help him tell new tales before he’s dead.

Seriously, I feel I have nothing left within of this reborn writer. And that’s killing me more than you’ll ever know. Losses and depression have blown out the flame that flickered to life from a dying ember ten years ago. And this inability to create life from thin air is killing me. So today I sat down and let something or somebody within nudge me toward creating this rhyming (GAG!) bit of what might be verse. Maybe that’s what I need. Just the impetus to drive forward, sadness, loss and ills be damned.

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Way of the World

Robins chase and spar
on the new-mown grass,
whether for sustenance
or sex doesn’t matter.
It’s just the way of their world.
Meanwhile, a hawk glides
on thermal waves
a-way up in cloud-washed skies.
His reason is more evident,
as his eyes scan
the flat green palette below
for any small moving shadow.
As his own shadow crosses over
the robins’ field of honor,
they scatter with mad flapping
and low trajectory
for the maples and pines,
since you can’t eat
nor procreate once you’ve become
vermillion-breasted tartare
in the belly of a red-tail.
Meanwhile, I sit and
watch it all, wondering
when my old instincts will return.
The ones that feed my soul,
express the intimate
of this Me-You relationship,
and helps me soar above
this pale gray palette
where shadows of stories are
all I have left of the Me
who also once took wing.

A stream-of-consciousness run of what I see outside my window and inside myself these days. The Way of the World is hard, no matter if you’re an air-coursing avian or an empty-headed mammal with a crumbling body and crumpled soul. The latter gained a little altitude during this flight of fancy.

Isn’t It Nice to Think So?

Maybe you were the water
that quenched my thirsty soul,
allowing it to bud and bloom
and bring forth something
I never knew lay fallow within me.
Or maybe you were the fertile soil
in which dormant soul seeds
were able to catch hold
and break through to the surface,
strong, able to withstand
the winds of all our storms.
It’s possible your voice
was the music that carried through
all the darkness and gales,
providing accompaniment
to the libretti I tended for all,
but really you.
Of course, maybe you weren’t
the be-all and end-all
of my tending to this concrete soul.
But look what just thinking
about that has helped me do.
So isn’t it nice to think so?

It’s Complicated

I wondered if you’d ever ask if,
in these cryptic columns of words,
I’ve drawn portraits of you.
No, I’d say, adding some gibberish
about craft and imagination,
sounding as pretentious as me
in a Bond St. suit and silk cravat.
But I pulled out some of these
heart-stained Rorschach blots,
turning each 360 degrees,
like scanning the whole horizon,
squinting to muddy the bloody,
searching for an expression of you.
Failing, I tossed each to scatter
in an array of wounds, of joys,
of so many of my life’s
moments I’d all but forgotten.
In a momentary glance across
the topography of them upon my desk,
one overlapping another, piles of
disparate drops coagulating into one,
I saw your face in a moment of grace,
and each time I blinked, I saw another.
Once, even my own. So, in answer
to your question, I can only say…
No…
Yes…
Maybe…
It’s complicated.
So goddamn complicated I can only
do it with my eyes closed and
consciousness tied behind my back.

With Dreams Inside My Eyes

“I have a bed, my very own.
It’s just my size.
And sometimes I like to sleep alone
with dreams inside my eyes.” ~ Mary Oliver

The doctor says I could go blind,
and for a moment my mind races
in frantic paces where sight
no longer graces my life like
random tones do a composer’s.
But then I realize I’m already seeing
such things in this darkened room.

There’s robin’s vermillion breast
coming to rest from azure above
to green below. And here’s your face,
unburdened by the toll of years,
the paths of tears, inviting yet
another riff on things only I
can see in you. The doctor says
we can arrest the coming darkness,
but what’s already lost
is gone forever.

I thank her and walk outside,
wearing what’s probably an odd grin.
She doesn’t know it’s at night,
with my eyes closed, I see
my life’s places and faces
so clearly. You may
tear away pieces of my sight,
but you’ll never steal my vision.

This piece was inspired by the final line of the first verse Mary Oliver’s Every Dog’s Story suggested my friend Annie Fuller. 

 

There With You, Here With Me

The Muse by Gabriel de Cool, 1895

I defer to you
when it comes to experience.
I haven’t been in your skin
when the time came to Yes or No,
Stay or Go, Be or Not Be.
You’ve made your choices,
even though you might believe
some were made for you.
But our lives have not
been a grand accident,
some Big Bang that
set in motion a journey
we’ll look back upon and
play in our lonely final repose
at lightning-fast forward.
Someday the final credits
will roll and you and
your epic life, that
singular litany of Dids and Dones,
stands a good chance of
no longer Doing, in that
final spark of experience,
perhaps I’ll be there with you.
That’s because while I experienced
these visions of lives
both real and imagined,
captured and chronicled
as I, alone in my skin,
tend to do, you’ve been here

…and here…

…and here…

with me.

So The Poets Tell Me

He asked me how I do this,
lacing words like macaroni
on a string of some thread
of a thought, like it’s
a Mother’s Day gift necklace
you dutifully made in second Grade.
Sometimes it’s that easy,
and it looks it, wonky doggerel
with broken mini penne sticking out
like a the the in the third line.
Other times, when you want to weave
something special,
like a fine Navajo blanket in verse,
it comes out looking like
one of those potholders you’d make
from stretchy bands on
a comb-toothed frame in Cub Scouts.
But when the right thought,
the right words,
the right secret sauce
of frantic inspiration
comes along,
thirty minutes staring into
the pale blue haze
of a laptop screen
just before dawn
can feel like only
a heartbeat, and look like
a poetic sundown sky scape
from the pages
of Arizona Highways.
Or so The Poets tell me.

Sorta, kinda inspired by my brother. Thanks, Mike. This probably doesn’t answer your question, but to think about the How usually ends up with me asking myself Why. And that’s a question I don’t think I can answer in one of my pieces of pasta jewelry like the word one above.