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How to Write a Poem

Andy 1 min read
poetry
Residential building in Aurene, neighborhood in Painted Post, NY; build around 2000
Stilfehler, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Stare out a window, any window, until your eyeballs loosen
and you spoon them out of your skull like two warm eggs.

Be sure to keep at least one nerve and one blood vessel
attached to the bowl of pudding that rests upon your spine.

Watch for hungry sparrows and squirrels, watch for children
too young to have forgotten to dream, watch for vandals

with empty burlap sacks, and masks pulled down around
their necks, and sad faces like unpollinated azaleas.

Toss your head as savagely as you wish; pull a scarf across
your eye sockets; touch your finger to the strawberry, plump

with decades of blood-rain, chanting inside your chest;
stomp the blood-worms gathering around your feet.

Have a feast. When else if not now? What else if not this?
For there’s a black veil in the sky, dirt tugging at your legs;

and in your backyard, a campground of bones shivers before
a pile of ears that will go deaf if you hold your tongue any longer.

More poetry

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poetry

Diary

Ages ago I kept a diary in a hand legible to
none but me. I read it on my knees as just-fallen

rain clings to pinecones like wet feathers,
the evening slips into its velvet gown,

and starlight pitter-patters on my head
like drops of gallium. I am thankful

the day is dying, for I have forgotten how
to live. Who wrote those words belongs

to an empire that collapsed under its
own grandiose weight, its high priest

· 1 min read
poetry

Enlightenment

I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
flapping against the sky and recalling that I am sky. Once,
the book well-thumbed and creased and read twice over,
I felt an ant crawl the length of my arm like a nagging
sense that

· 1 min read
poetry

Foul Weather Friend

I am a foul weather friend, dear poetry.
I have paid you no mind when spring rains
wash clean the marble statues of gods
and a cheery sun
reads aloud your sweet inscriptions,
nor when awed children skip through museums,
nor accordion-song fills the subway,
nor a stranger does another stranger
a kindness,
nor blueberries are so ripe they bleed sugar,
nor velvet chocolate cake knocks you dizzy with love,
nor, after making love, my wife’s perfume
clings

· 1 min read