poem

 The Wasteland

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