writing a poem is like

sending a great

 

is

 

off into space

 

maybe even a great

 

AM

 

or taking a ball of dough

and squeezing

it down

to a

 

.

 

only

to stretch

it apart to look

at the lovely windowpane

 

To look upon the world

Through a lens of dough,

And seeing everything curled,

By light streaming through

 

A gluten-enforced, uncooked masterpiece,

Which will soon be a masterpizza.

 

Poems are breaths of air that puff out of pizza crusts, and come over the hoary cloudtops

through thickets of kapok trees and around splashes of rainwater.

They are that which you inhale to every last nerve ending,

to seap exhausted from your pores and cry lovesick from your eyes.

 

They meander through forests of the hypothetical and the hypocritical

and wind up somewhere not too far from home,

 

close to the poplar you named after your favorite koi. They climb the branches

and shout down to us, remind us that life is like spiralling in the cochlea of some

 

giant, or some god. Or feeling in the light for a darkswitch.

Or surfacing offshore to find a thousand waterskis given your name.

 

Or being a mouse dropped into a hedge maze.

Or tying a chair up with a hose, inquiring where its poem

 

is. Or asking what was so secret about the conversation that the chair can no longer say.

Or having a slant rhyme dream.