by Thomas Davis
When I fell into a word
and saw a slime slug by
in a rainbow of trailing foam,
I tried to speak,
but all I could say
was that tripping into words
was a strange way to live a life,
even when rainbows fizzed and popped
all over the place,
and gold rained light
into blank corners of who you could be, but weren’t.
Then, struggling from one word trap into another,
like a hero from a great film
that reels on and on into forever,
as foaming rainbow tipped upside down,
I lost my head
and started dancing from invisible star to star
even though the word I was in
was so sticky it made dancing as jerky
as Frankenstein’s movement
in Mary Shelly’s head.
Looking for meaning in all this
I tripped again and fell upside down
into the rainbow’s arc
where tomorrow was no more
and the screaming present more real
than any mythology conjured up by images
made concrete by a poet’s out of control pen.
When I grabbed onto yet another word
bathed in rainbow light
and endowed with more fizz than pop,
I stopped falling
and herded into an elegant forest
where words fluted and piped
and created a strangeness in my head
that threatened sanity
and promised life was an ant hill
teeming with more than what could be said
by crawling around in words all day.
At that moment I swore off words forever
and became the poet of silence,
dancing with this babe
who wore words as a cloak
that revealed more than it ever hid.
No wonder poets chase after words
as if they are delightful–
even when meanings turn on them
and leave them gasping like butterflies
fluttering on the point of a pin.
fourwindowspress 