The Only Way Out Is Through

Here is how we whistle for hammer head sharks
–steely torpedoes awaiting to be soft served
in bowls of sweet meat we won’t finish before dark–
let them swim to a shoreline of 1000 suns curved
like so many jaws, abutments of bone between now
& minutes shook hence in tremors before
this island volcanos elegant quake. You plow
& toe the black baked soil, flick ashes shore
while I keep losing gravity & waves exhale & spray
tracing the beach & its foam shifting spine, sand
zipping noisily beneath your feet. You can’t look away
until a typhoon of blood pulls down the roaring firmament and
a kind of death runs its language along your thigh.
Such a shame you can’t look your rescuer in the eye.

***

Form makes me uncomfortable. Its like putting together a puzzle instead of allowing the poem to just happen and, ahem, form itself. When I look at a poem born of form, my critical mind just looks at how well I adhered to the rules, not whether the poem is good or excites me or not.

But its been hard to write the last couple of weeks. Depressed, I guess. Infected with Why Bothers. I was happy to have found and settled with Touch (Abstraction) the other day, brain exercise I created out of desperation and boredom to create work. So here’s another bid to work through my block. Sometimes the only way out…