poem 187 of a poem a day for 2012

too sweet a jelly roll

(“I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.” Margaret Mead)

I am tining Margaret Mead

with rusted cars and dying stars

painting my portrait 

with the scalpel of time

I have pilfered my last humanity

I have sold it for magic beans

to vine myself to anywhere but here

there are these ghost vestiges 

of faces I’ve worn to stay alive

that are now choral gangsters

cutting down my thoughts

with arrangements that play

on in my head

perhaps I‘ve been dead

for a long time now

and I haven’t awoken to that fact

perhaps all the seed birds

of morning are merely

picking off my crumb trail reality

from the woods I'm in

I walked in looking

for someone else

that feels what I feel

when I mirror the world

as being alive

or perhaps I just need

another saint of anthropology

to dig up my bones

and distill my extracts

my exact formula

for raising the dead parts

past hot air and

into the rain again

you know begin

with a few notes

and hum along

pretty soon a song appears

to know my name

from the inside out

and I shout ferociously absent words

into the filling of an empty soul

and hope poems fall

from the sky

that neatly tie

my life together

EJR ©