This long, dusty path:   its cadence ...
No.   Strike that.
My skeptical feet, and terrible cadence of this path ...
No.   Start again. Remember last night's lines?

Try them. I am (this is from last night) ... I am
a question mark after a question that has never been asked.
Or better, maybe: I am an unanswerable interrogation,
a querulous shadow in a skin of burdens.

Hey, wait! Wait a minute! Here they come again!
Out of the corner of my eye, I see their small
dusty shapes, one after another: birds, certainly birds.

They could be swooping past the kitchen window.
They could be bursting, bursting, bursting
out of my head, straight out through my left ear. Who knows?
And there goes another one!

Well, wherever they're coming from — outdoors or out of
my scrambled head, these birds are playing hell
with a poet's important reverie and the composition of deathless verse.
Bloody birds! Intercede for me, St. Dymphna, patroness of the mad.

© John Thomas