I tried my hand at some longer form poetry. Feel free to ignore the meta.
Poetry
It wanders.
Caught in a desert of its own creation
Years
So many years it spent
making it,
Grinding down stone,
Or doing whatever it is you do to make sand.
Nonetheless, fashioning each grain of sand,
building the impassable mountains, the deep crevices,
producing this natural prison
one word at a time
But poetry was not alone in this work
It had help, blame has multiple shoulders to sit upon
With cracked lips it remembers what it was before
The God of the Sun, the Ra of humanity’s heart.
Sitting up on its golden throne
an army of poets at its feet.
Scribbling down each word, each movement, each breath
of this god
But enthroned poetry was crestfallen,
it did not want more, it wanted less.
“Too many speak of me as if they know me,
A god should not be on the lips of every peasant” it said.
“Yes, Yes!” chanted the poets.
I shall not take full leave of you.
I will live in a temple of dreams
the memories of the future…..
With a startled sputter, poetry awakes.
Sand, laying across half of its face,
“This is not how it was meant to be!” sobbing.
This was a temple, a temple, a temple….
I am now Sisyphus without a stone,
if only I had a stone; if only I had a stone.”
That night, a light, in the distance it saw,
a faint glow upon a mountain’s foot.
“They have come,
they have found me,” poetry thinks.
Tearing off its torn shirt, thinking, “its better to come in my skin than with these rags.”
It moves with a purpose it has not known in a century—strident, truthful
Each step a step from lost to found
And right before it walks into the edge of the camp, it licks its lips a few times,
making sure they look at least a bit moist—taking the edge off its desolation.
I wonder how they will react, now that their search is over, he thinks as he steps into the fire’s light.
And here they are, the ones who should find him.
Well, Poetry doesn’t know who they are,
but regardless,
they are undoubtedly the “greats,” part of the “canon,” the big “kahunas”
as one might say.
Poetry had already decided that it would not speak first
He waited,
there are seven of them.
The perfect number.
Each putting down their dinners
and wineskins
because in the wilderness
poets always drink wine out of wineskins.
“We’ve been looking for you” one of them says.
“I know,” says Poetry, with as much gumption and gravity as it can muster.
T.S. Eliot hits first.
And Poetry finds out that it can’t take a punch.
And the rest pile on;
Ginsburg and Plath
Frost and Neruda
Vladimir Mayakovsky with his beefy hands,
and one other.
Poetry learns
that blows from un-calloused hands
still hurt
but not as much
as kicks from steel toed boots.
The other one,
breaks a half full bone-white tea cup
on Poetry’s shoulder.
Poetry remembers, when it said in all seriousness, “I am the voice of the dead”
And with its last breath,
it did nothing
but breathe
