Fruitful Fingers

I long to write with fruitful fingers.

To suckle sweet,

Let honey dribble,

The page a canvas,

A garden,

A sky,

Paper or dirt,

Neither I mind.

I’ll wield a pen, 

Of hickory,

I’ll free that youthful girl inside,

The one who sings,

The one who cries.

Apollo will know,

Neither which way,

With roots of gold,

And leaves like rye.

Let her write my chorus,

Let her sing my rhymes.

For the world, the world,

A damned place indeed,

Cries with laughter,

And screams their pleas. 

A thorn, a thorn,

I bleed from my thigh

Neither short,

Neither high.

I condemn, yes I condemn!

Bloody thorns,

And broken violins,

Early ‘morns,

And shiny long pins.

Could a fruitful poem be so sweet?

So wicked?

So lost?

So incomplete?

A fruitful poem grows not,

From fruitless fingers,

And stomachs of knots.

But from sickly sweet flowers,

And orange rains,

Favorite wings,

They’re one to blame.

A fruitful poem can live sweet only so long,

Before the flies swarm,

And drown their fleek tongues.

Rot. Yes rot, a poem may,

For I long for fruitful poems,

And instead a fruitless name.

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