If I could do it on my own, I would
without any help from anyone else
but the art of writing is no longer
a solitary act, as it involves
everyone whose interest it is to dream
to succeed without fail, a social act
but rarely an act of revolution
more likely an act of pure reaction
based on likes and dislikes, not unbiased,
without a whiff of objectivity
unless pretentions assume such a stance,
a position of mauvaise foi, bad faith,
I am what I am not and I am not
who I am, a pact with self-delusion,
a life in the closet, not just for gays,
but for anyone with their own secret,
their worst secret reveals a soul sickness,
a soul composed of mind and viscera,
the viscera that informs our conscience
which in turn informs our experience,
but if I hold a pen in my right hand
and imagine a thought will end up down
on the page in black ink, I fool myself,
for I get lost in the words, in language,
in the games we play as writers of verse
or prose, as the letters jumble themselves
in anagrams or acrostics or both
to form anagram acrostc sonnets,
and I see eight-letter words as I read
and jot them down for later to puzzle
out a six-letter word in relation
to the first for an octet and sestet
or two quatrains that pose to the reader
a problem and a sestet to conclude
with or without a solution whose wit
resides in a rhyming couplet, how lame
my horse on the racetrack with a shotgun
blast to the head I end her suffering
but before I shoot I see a squirrel
and think look at that squirrel on the tree
how strange its life must be and I am lost
as I walked away from my broken horse
on a racetrack, lame with a shattered leg,
as I become distracted from duties
I don't care to perform, I shirk the chance
to act with care, responsible for life,
to take life, to choose death in a moment
when another's needs are greater, I must
not go off and quarrel with a squirrel,
or open my dictionary to find
a definition, etymology,
and origins of words upon the page,
No! I must shoot the horse and end a life
to choose death over lysergic acid
and its hallucinatory powers
for the squirrel is me lost in a maze,
which is simply a maze, not a labyrinth,
though we call it a labyrinth for we know
not the difference between the two, lazy
lions dozing in the sunshine, a zoo
where a bull-headed man stubbornly asks
why is this sword for me, I harm no one,
the shame you feel disappears when I do
apparently in death you choose to care
for me as if I were like a lame horse
on a racetrack, but you cannot efface
the memories of my absent presence,
the shame you feel rises from deep within
missing from your daily experience
you cry when a bullfrog eats a horsefly.
