Except For This Poetry

 

Except For This Poetry

Nothing exists except for this poetry,
these perfect words with lines and curls
I once would have written with pen.
I do now and again
but I fear they will be misread
or
others misled by their
meaning.

Look into my spiral notebooks or the
first journal I carried on a plane in 1972
and you will likely conclude
I was a teenage boy with long hair and
sad eyes.

And yet
if you read the files on my computer today
you might conclude much the same except my
age is nearly reversed. I wrote better 60
years ago.
I colored well outside the lines and if I
could not find the words
I invented them.
Now I just write about what I did back then.

What I know for sure, the molten elements at my core
have not changed in half a century. The tectonic plates
have shifted,
the tides have lifted driftwood from islands I will
never visit.
But magnetic north has not slipped far enough
to matter.
Liquids, gasses, and solids play the dance we try to
solve instead of romancing the turning of the hours.

Everything exists except for this poetry,
these scribbled words never green, but blue or black
between the lines without a pencil or eraser.
I do not fear another misreading. The last thing I write
will only be misleading

If you have not taken the time to scribble some
of your own.