June 27, 2017

soaked to the bone

You imagined an empty porch, a stiff drink, a ream of paper stacked at your feet,
the hot breath of the Muse at your neck and all those paragraphs catching fire.
In your mind's cinematic eye, a novel was unfolding frothily inside this microcosm,
sharp-tongued poems licking at the glass. Instead, the neighbor's backyard carpentry
keeps possessing your pages, the dog trolls haphazardly in and out of the narrative,
lashing you with forlorn, guilt-inducing looks, and a boy falls into your lap, sobbing,
ripping each line in wet, jagged seams. Whatever you thought you were keeping out
is finding a way in, and the great art of your perfect, kempt desire is mottled with a rain
your tidy world cannot repel. The room keeps pawing you with the fleshy demands of a story
that refuses all margins, but here you are in the downpour, soaked to the bone with words.