How to Write Poetry ...

We must fill ourselves with gardens,
clean underwear, wear our mother’s rings,
ballet slippers, heavy covers,
a sense of forgiveness during
the A.M. hours.

Beloved, we must falter.

Cancer bemoans its chore,
Heartaches shuffles anxious,
Age looks upward
at the four winds
of fragile existence.

We trundle regardless
through star-glossed nights,
thin from shivering, we write crudely
in carpeted rooms, make love
beneath banisters where red cats watch,
and salvage the tenacity of joy.

Forget your muse, her tight blue jeans
and trashy smile. Forget red pens dangling
from wooden ceilings. Reach out
through that open window, on the far side
of your sparse apartment. Before
you peer into the pulse and catch the smell
of hotdog and exhaustion,

You must wake, beloved, we must wake.