Ars Poetica

When Lou Reed died, the raven told me:
Toss the empty chambered thirty-eight
Into the red blender with a bruised Peruvian mango.
Blend on high speed. Break the blender.

Drink the poem, sweet and sharp, a threat.
It will grow in you like a landslide. Bury
the living, exhume the dead, the raven said.

She never shuts up, pelts: no one survived
The flight, so write, as if this horrible news
Is a foil thing to stash like treasure or trash.
Orion hunts the nest with arrow pen.

And Tapihritsa, upon attaining rainbow body
Didn’t bother sniffing the pits of his abandoned robes.
He didn’t say a thing about the new Snow White,
Or snow, or white, or Lou Reed’s raven scarf,
Or any of the missing dead. All is all he said.

Thus my work is cut. I will replicate Amor
And Psyche’s melting jalus strokes with my life.
I will drink water like a witch and spit words
Like broken teeth. The teeth will say two things:

One. You didn’t have to move. Rest. It is best
To be still without leaning on anything else.

Two. Rest the word against anything.
Your emptiness is not the only medicine.

2014