The Poet Meditates Upon the Poem
The poet contemplates the porcupine of thought and gets stuck
Inside the realization that even a prickly king of the animal kingdom must curse
His flesh vulnerable to the vicious variety of only half-envisioned fate, so that
The poet arms up with all the pain of the mammal making his mark
Upon the impermanent day, the unprotected heir to worldly pain
In the dying twilight
Where the poet ruminates upon the paintings of dusk and draws
A blank, because no earthly poet has created these round forms of fate
Whose colors clash and make their splash upon the sea.
And the sea spills from the dry canvas of light and sound, and says straight
Out that nowhere equals somewhere in the eyes of the painter
Of the dying moonlight
In which the poet ingurgitates Death and comes up with
Nothing, a simple, merely simple solution to an age-old battering
Of dense thought against the animal agony of a world of forms.
Colors cry out against their round death as mammals pummel
Each other ever after even as the sea says stop, please, don't stop
In the dying sunlight
When the poet meditates upon the poem and other poems until turning
Blue and dying egotistically into the poem and thereby becoming poetry in the wind
That rakes up the sand, swept away like the sand in the sea. And the sea spills outward
From the canvas of poetry, leaving only the poet standing on the beach
Of impermanence, to rejoice and lament, and lament and rejoice again
In the everliving daylight.
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