A Penal Colony For Poets

I committed a crime when I was young:

I threw my poems away.

The poetic police caught up with me,

they said I’d have to pay.

When I asked them how they found me,

they said I had a haunted look

from the ghosts of words discarded,

enough to fill a phantom book.

The colony was on the moon,

the mode of transport: ladder.

I had to build it myself with words;

this only made me sadder.

I had thrown my words away, you see,

so I had to go door to door

asking if anyone had spare words.

My cheeks burned ’til they were sore.

Eventually I had the words

like toaster scuttle marmalade.

They weren’t my own but they would do;

I had none that were homemade.

The ladder hooked the crescent moon,

I climbed in my bare feet.

Hands snatched at me, knives cut my skin,

how I wished I could retreat.

When I got there all I had were years

mining words from the white dust,

words from my lost writings,

words I did not trust.

The first I saw was corridor

then travel dream and trees

always time skies flown and child.

They brought me to my knees.

Happy I was to see them again,

I would reclaim my poems at last.

But they had dissolved into each other,

stray phrases floated past.

Let travel you me with always

I couldn’t piece them together

of the through the labyrinth night

my sorrow had no measure.

But whatever I found was mine to keep

so I made a little garden.

With autumn sunlight meadow and rose

my heart could now unharden.

When my time was up they found me,

said I was free to move to Mars,

but I told them I would stay here

in my hut made out of stars.