December is poetry month here at WillSpirit. Please forgive the digression as I take a needed break from essay writing. Just scroll back to November to get to the real substance.

At first,
A poem lurks in the mind’s shadowy back streets
Where dream symbols line the alleys like graffiti tags,
And fantasies lie about like crazed cobblestones underfoot.
Where art is the only unbroken stone.

It wears a cloak of memories as dark as compost
And a necklace of fossils, a string
Of vertebrae picked from the skeletons
Of frantic prehistoric birds that crash-landed,
And became swallowed by sediment black with regret.

The poem,
That bent and crafty shaman,
Leaves its footprints
On the hardening pavement that covers our soul.

Its lyrics ripen and rot,
Like damp leaf litter.
Their warmth penetrating the hermetic chamber of the buried self.

The words leech out the decomposing forms of our lost childhood.
Recalling our betrayed freedom.
Restoring our failed beauty.

The poem nurses its mystery and seed.

Under every stanza, under every assonance and rhyme,
The subliminal strata of memory whisper their lies,
And ancient confusions repeat themselves in hieroglyphs
Carved along the worn corridors of our detours and destinies.

Even so,
The words gather strength in tangled masses
Crowding their funereal lair
Taking on the shapes of Egyptian scrolls and
Cadaveric organs in canopic jars.

And then a resurrection…

The varicose lines straighten
And the poem begins to blossom.
Its organic and crystalline filigrees
Grow out an unselfconscious flower.

And our blank, honest face finally emerges
From its lazy hibernation in the egg of bone.

The poem now walks upright,
Its wide yellow path smoothing a way over rough ground
Guarded and shadowed by the mossy trunks of primordial oaks.

At first it hesitates, dormant and shaded,
But then it gains the courage to dismantle our armaments,
To exit our battlements and spread into the open countryside.

It strolls forth to plant its tiny, potent kernels
In the gentle and willing loam of our larger and happier dream.

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