Cold Autumn Day

 

 

I.

this is
what
words
amount
to—
festivals
of ash,
collapsed
into urns,
held
up by
timid folk
for the
bold to
scatter.

 II.

Poems are train-wrecks
            that move— to stand
on tracks, to do so solidly, is
            suicide of a high order—
 
to die by force of wreckage—

 III.

On why it has to be that writing

comfortable garbage is the inevitable

byproduct of living comfortably, with

each fresh hell I wonder why the hooks

towards artful utterance are set this

way, & why I must become such an oyster

just to confer into a leaking bucket,

insecurely hung from abraded cables,

a blue droplet not even of blood but

of nectar, or wine, or whiskey— 

IV.

Times you get bored
with the process, but
 
worse are times when
words are little deaths,
 
wrung out like sheets,
draped over hangers,
 
out in a damp yard on
a cold autumn day, as
 
wind rises to pin them
to your hopeless breast.