Brevity
I need a good poem
lifespan-short, one
I can shoe-horn between instants
which in that pinch says so much
I’ll understand long and short
by the depth of calluses
built upon my brain—
but it’s not happening
I’m already up to nine lines
so it’s too late for brevity—
what I want is one
that says something
without rolling on forever,
Amazon-like swaying
to topographical switches and
twists in rivers and streams
or cul-de-sacs of human error,
but now I see
this won’t end here
in brute summation
like a dead fish
wrapped mafia-like in newsprint
warning of impending
but once-avoidable
consequence,
no, it’ll go on
until all nouns,
verbs, conjugations,
& absolute clauses
have been spent,
until this mine of
memory and metaphor
is no more complete
than the store of meanings
dragged inside-out
by the flow of pregnant clauses
rendered in blood & bone
which lead to others and others and others
like cups filled & spilled into the flow
of sea-bound floods of multitudes of
sisters and brothers and cousins,
uncles and aunts and
fathers and mothers;
…………………………….—what if “brevity”
is just one more thing that seems?
Jim Culleny
7/1/18
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