One day you stumble upon a secret realm
Of color and harmony.
It’s the Land of Poetry!
Everything here is made of it—
Trees, grass, squirrels, the
Pain in the ass neighbors
Who complain when your kid’s ball
Rolls down the hill into their yard.
We call them a sestina.
But you think — What a marvelous discovery!
It’s been here all along!
Just when you thought all the magical
Wonder of the world had been used up
And there was nothing left to write
That hadn’t already been said
And no good way of framing it
That hadn’t been done before.
But soon the adrenaline wears off
And a certain kind of paranoia sets in,
An anticipatory surveillance
Where the watchers are all waiting for you
To start doing something about it—
Linking and braiding and looping
Some of these bits and fragments
Back together again in interesting ways
We’ve never seen or heard before.
You know you’re on the right track
If just reading one elicits
Nostalgia for the ethereal world
Of dreams our old selves used to have
Alongside memories of events that actually happened—
What we did and how it felt
Finally meeting up after all these years of parallel play.
Summon everything you can muster
In the form of an archaic keening, as long as you can, until your voice goes hoarse
And you're forced to either take a breath or die.
But before the sudden silence swells a second longer
You hear someone else screaming back
And it’s not just your own echo.
Configurations like that only rarely resonate
Across the canyons of isolation
But you don’t know how.
You’re a poem yourself
Written in a dialect from 15th century Gallipoli.
To your mother you’ve always been
A walking, talking Shakespeherian sonnet.
All your friends could see it
And loved you because you didn’t.
Good old Jeff, trying to pass himself off as prose again—
Over-plotted, whimsical, and morose.
Even your notepad and pen
Are stray verses wandered off
From an ode on the love of your life.
6/9/25