thirty-three painted ponies crossed the sky last night

when you write poetry you have
to be insane to curl words around
leaves of despair, you have to take a
master's brush. stroke elongated sentences
with intricate cobwebs of desire gleaming like
beads of pearls on the twisted vines of your lines,
greening and trumpeting like distant
Halleluyahs,
you have to break through every conch, seed and eggshell
you have absorbed, a changeling in your most intimate
nightmare, you have to exonerate yourself
and the world will leave you to your glory,
you have to fuck twenty-seven dirty angels and
you must surrender to the somber grey
palette of emptiness
always erasing you like some ronin assassin lying just
beneath the next poem waiting to be birthed,
you suffer in quiet agony, you are a ritual
unto yourself
and you are willing to die into words that will
never be written for they lie under your Lover's pillow
and his dreams you can never touch
and so you surrender to your blood ebbing into the sand
of your redemption
and you make yourself a mandala and sing
you just sing your
return from your sojourn of incompletion
you are a scarlet letter
and a vulture, dying
you crush yourself whole
and flesh out the marrow of another poem

you are forever tormented by the Buddha of Compassion, for you
are a poet in name only
you unearth demons inside and you
wear sackcloth and ashes on the other side of a mirror,
you are a dream awakening on the glass wings of a butterfly
you are loon attempting to cast another spell for the
white lady in the lake and your fingers disappear
in the heart of the last angry man,
a Good Samaritan,
you see yourself, dust upon the road


thirty three painted ponies crossed the sky last night
perhaps they were waves
or streaks of fire.