July 4, 2023

the practice **

In the mirror she’s rumpled, clothes that won’t meet exactly. 
There’s half-baked imagining, then looking closer, a frizzling love,
with none of the outcomes. Behind each door, blueprints toggle 
to roughshod ideas and back to dust again. The glitch of the practice talks, 
but how else would it manage the room. A plan can’t face its stride, 
drags its dejected stink up the street. So what? Every living mechanism 
knows worry, and the misbegotten nights somehow end. Foundling hands 
wrestle, reach up, then wake, and unforecast, a wild glory turns up its heels, 
jiggering the catwalk into delinquency. Who can hold all the wires, 
given the humidity'?

** I created this week’s poem by giving myself the (very strict) parameter of using only the words contained in last week’s “10-line Tuesday” poem to work with, though I didn’t have to use all of them.