In Which The Poet Attempts To Say Goodbye To Poetry

When we part ways

the world will be

straightforward once again. 

A cup will be a cup. 

A shoe will be a shoe

not a soup ladle 

not a megaphone

not a submarine.

Mornings will not awaken 

as if they were creatures 

stirring after long sleep. 

Yesterday’s eye exam

should have been routine

but I saw the optician’s legs curl

round each other like snakes. 

I saw the back of my own retina 

as the cracked surface of a clay planet. 

This will not do. 

My eyeball is not a planet

for if it were then I would be

my own solar system

perhaps even a galaxy.

Just thinking about it

makes me dizzy.

When I am in your company

the whole world can shift in a moment. 

There is no solid ground.

When you and I part ways

the women will wear quite ordinary hats. 

Their heads will not sprout flowers, 

will not become bird nests. 

Trees will not grow arms or claws. 

I will be able to go 

for an ordinary stroll 

on an ordinary day 

in the ordinary woods. 

The green will just be green,

not a leprechaun’s shirt or dragon’s eye.

You were wonderful. 

You sang me songs 

when the train chugged out of the station. 

The tunnel was the night, 

was a route to the underworld, 

was the inside of my own mind. 

Now everything will go back to normal. 

I won’t cry. 

Only poems make me cry. 

They produce tears like jewels 

tumbling out of a treasure chest.

I am trying to say goodbye

but I can’t do it.

You see,

I think

I may 

have

fallen

in love,

with 

you.

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.