I Can't Confess What I Should Have Always Known
Poems fall out of my head and dissolve like Jello.
Which is weird-speak for saying that after the weekend of amazing productivity (2 stories written, 2.5 stories edited, several things posted) my brain is burning out. I really want to finish my two Apo-verse fics but my brain is churning out poems. And poem fragments.
Poem:
I Can’t Confess What I Should Have Always Known
I’m so used to monologuing to the empty air
It’s hard to speak when I know you’re standing there.
Listen. I listen. I listen in coffee shops and in conversations
At reunions, churches, street corners,
But I came here to talk.
Talk behind the veil of public confession.
Talk into black corridors until the words are gone
Talk until I lick my lips to wet them and I can’t
Because my thoughts are dried up at last.
Without them I’m a bare cupboard
Useful, hollow, wiped down, uncluttered, released.
That’s the way it was.
But now I feel you in the dark
And with you all those thousand million people past the veil.
I see the jumbled marketplace of isms,
Hover cars, homophones and chrisms, schisms
Roaring down my hollow halls.
I close and lock my mouth, pin down and fold my thoughts,
Put them back on the shelf.
I have nothing worth selling, and nothing to sell I can do without.
* * *
I have no idea what this poem is about, and i'm trying not to think about it too much. And I also haven't counted the stresses and syllables. I have a bad tendency when something gets anywhere close to iambic pentameter to want to make it all fit into a pretty little blank verse outline. I'm resisting.
I have tried reading it aloud and I like that.
Which is weird-speak for saying that after the weekend of amazing productivity (2 stories written, 2.5 stories edited, several things posted) my brain is burning out. I really want to finish my two Apo-verse fics but my brain is churning out poems. And poem fragments.
Poem:
I Can’t Confess What I Should Have Always Known
I’m so used to monologuing to the empty air
It’s hard to speak when I know you’re standing there.
Listen. I listen. I listen in coffee shops and in conversations
At reunions, churches, street corners,
But I came here to talk.
Talk behind the veil of public confession.
Talk into black corridors until the words are gone
Talk until I lick my lips to wet them and I can’t
Because my thoughts are dried up at last.
Without them I’m a bare cupboard
Useful, hollow, wiped down, uncluttered, released.
That’s the way it was.
But now I feel you in the dark
And with you all those thousand million people past the veil.
I see the jumbled marketplace of isms,
Hover cars, homophones and chrisms, schisms
Roaring down my hollow halls.
I close and lock my mouth, pin down and fold my thoughts,
Put them back on the shelf.
I have nothing worth selling, and nothing to sell I can do without.
* * *
I have no idea what this poem is about, and i'm trying not to think about it too much. And I also haven't counted the stresses and syllables. I have a bad tendency when something gets anywhere close to iambic pentameter to want to make it all fit into a pretty little blank verse outline. I'm resisting.
I have tried reading it aloud and I like that.