What drives my pen so fitfully?
For days it idles, the pages blank,
Returning my stare, then a quickening,
And it moves again, trailing words, aware;
I wonder, for this, is the moon to thank?
The moon of madmen, poets, lovers,
Can draw an ocean around the earth.
Do her tides also flow through me, in the
Making, and unmaking of this birth? For
When she's full and ripe, nothing comes;
Thoughts into words will not translate.
But when she wanes and hides her face,
Words jostle and flow across the space
Between hand and page, land and sea;
Ripping in a flood, a furious spate,
Pen gouging another promontory
From the blanked-out contour of my coast,
Pushing into No Man's Land
An occulting light, a listening post.
Blood at the full is pulled up to the head,
Recedes from the beaches of the heart.
Engorges the crazy, in his locked in skull;
Abandons the poet, lovelorn, dumb and dull,
Weeping on a wordless shore, wondering
If ever the sea, once more, will flood
Across his dried out, empty flats;
Wishing he'd not ignored those caveats.
Love's a lunacy ungoverned by reason;
But a lover's a madman set apart,
For madness is an affliction of the head,
And love's a scribbling within the heart.
Poet, lover, or mad, ruled alike in a game;
Lost heart, lost mind, different, but the same
Blood fermented, clouded, seething hot.
We curse and bless and curse the moon;
Damn her eyes, the bitch, but she's all we've got.
