TheBanyanTree: The Way to Kill A Poem

[LLDeMerle]

The way to kill a poem
is to put it on hold
let minutia drag you off: over, under, anywhere
until you dig in and stop
dust off and start again, this time
slightly off-center
A little less inspired, you start to connect the dots
when the phone rings
"I'll let the machine get it," you decide
but listen anyway
because it might be something important
like Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes Notification Office
even though you didn't enter
or more importantly, your aunt

and it is, so you putter while
she tells you her news and you
shelve the poem
for love
because after all
a poem
never read you stories
or baked you cookies
or took you on vacation.

So you hang up and shake out the poem, fluff it up lovingly, with tenderness
look it in the eye, study it, trace the first line...though...you might have
forgotten something...oh, yes
the kettle whistles

Confident in your ability to brew coffee and a poem at the same time
you grind the beans and pour the water into the filter while
The Others come out
padding through with arms full of laundry
greetings, requests, opening cans of tuna
so the cat bursts in, wailing like a siren to ensure it's remembered
she likes tuna too, even though she has licked every can opened since 1999
and so finally you admit the poem has shrivelled
like a once-luscious blossom whose face tilted up 
towards the sun its petals translucent with
glory, now plucked, it cows dejectedly and prays to roll away with the breeze.

Go ahead. You can step on it now, it's done.

You'll never get it back, that moment where a thought unfurls and beckons other
delectable, delicious words who swoon towards it 
and it breaths them into itself winding, twisting and weaving into
something with a life of its own, someplace where 
you discover yourself when you didn't think it 
possible to know any more about yourself or how 
you think or wish or hope and it might be perfection or at least its euphoric
and then the phone rings.

The moment is God.







© 2008 LLDeMerle