have broken the rocks"
~Tennessee Williams
Deciding to be a poet
is like entering a mountain
carving contest with an old spoon.
Trusty as that old spoon may be,
it is not a spoon unlike any other,
it is the same—yet with it you must mine
through layers of catching cliches and matted
sameness until you have unearthed an ore
pure and untouched by man's redundant finger.
The judges want nothing more
than originality—no faux pyramids,
dense presidents, or gargantuan Grecian urns
they say. They want you to blaze a trail
up one side, and roll a snowball
down the other, or flip the mountain
on its top and spin it like a prism
in a whirlwind thriving
wind-chime.
Nothing short of that
may even catch their waxy eye.
Even so,
sometimes you will cut the crown off
and scoop out charred handfuls
of useless lava, which you'll strew
about like mustard seed, planting drops
of mountain everywhere you will never reap.
Sometimes you'll undermine the sound
integrity of the tectonic, technical structure
and cause it to capsize, meter by meter
into an ocean of bubbly fury—just a personal
natural disaster that will never see the light
of a printed page—and you'll wonder
what....or how a fledgling poet is to ever rest?
On other days you will incessantly bore
a tunnel—through the mountain's foot, only to realize
you were always there to dig a cave
as you discover the golden Buddha
patiently aglow at a perfect ending....
which took your life, sacrificially, to burrow.
If you are lucky, it will rain though.
And your mountain will be blessed
with a stream that will hew through
the heart of your poem like molten love,
carrying the universe's spirit
in its small, fertile breadth,
rousing life around it—
like an opened birth canal—
yet spanning that immense, barren plain
between blood and soul
in a single skip
of a regular heartbeat.
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