When Poems Procreate

I love it when my poems get procreative.

While I loved a lot of things about my May 13th poem, I liked it in pieces. There were some lines I loved too much to discard. Instead of "murdering my darlings," I gave them their own poems.

The first grew out of a revision exercise where I began by writing the poem backwards. It's a revision technique I particularly like, because it opens my work up to a lot of new meanings. I call this one "Worry Habit."

I used to know
what unquiet thoughts
would make you
put down the guitar,
loved in calloused hands,
and make you pick at your nails
instead of the soothing strings,
unable to distract you,
even now.



The next is "Missed Communication"

When words neglect emotion
you speak in notes
plucked with frenzied fingers
saying better and faster than your mouth can move.

Against the guitar your torso lies still
and says nothing of what is in your head
but the song you play
again, again, again.

You sing in strings with a vibrato
I do not understand
and a tone I cannot touch.

You beg me to hear your tune,
and I do,
I just wish these were words I knew.



The final poem I titled "Homeless."

You are the place I once called "home,"
the scent of May and
a southern sun on the back porch,
the tree outside my window
whose branches hum me to sleep.

I felt it in my body
lying still
to experience the senses of awake
and lying there
I fall asleep.

You are still "home,"
but now you are twenty-four-hundred miles away
and I walk through you in memories
smelling of dreams
where the scent of May has dissolved,
and the sun never sets behind the house and,
cut down, the trees don't sing.

I remember what it was like
to feel you,
but memories are too insubstantial
to touch and be touched.