Author's Note: Here’s a poem about what sometimes actually causes writer’s block—the poem eluding the poet, the poem always trying to get away from the poet, which it almost always does, leaving the poet with a few words and syllables turning to ashes on the tongue." 

  
Writing the Poem


Write quickly enough
and the mind won’t catch up.  The poem
will start singing “One bright morning, I’ll fly away”
or jump from a Walmart roof,
or swim in a La Quinta pool.  By itself,
the poem will make friends with furniture salesmen,
and eat avocados just arrived from Monday. 
To your great annoyance, it will whistle Tears for Fears songs
and take rowboats out into the fogs off Nova Scotia,
be a spider, an armrest, a fingernail clipper,
a handful of differential equations.  You’ll pursue it,
hearing yourself screaming for it to stop,
yet if you’re lucky, it won’t turn around.  It’s a naked back
with a Kinkaid tattoo.  It’s a Chinese gong.  It’s a Suburu
crossing borders, crashing into flagpoles.  
It spins like a monumental head.
It doesn’t have any idea of True North,
nor mushrooms, nor leather watchbands.
“Bring on the foolscap,” it says,
“hills and meadows, fire escapes, seaplanes,
what do I care?”  Poet naïf, poet of the corner store
with your mind set upon camera lenses and canary yellow,
are you in your right mind?  Do you follow smoke trails? 
The poem is a pointer beam, a chip of June,
and it mocks you, it’s mocking you right now.

Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF​