Inspired by Canto [21]

I can try to be the poet of the body,And the poet of the soul.

I can try to be the poet of myself,a bard chanting some tune played on a lyre strung with my heartstrings, Grafting word with wordless emotion,the latter I carry in excess, stuffed into small boxes of the former.

A scratch of a pencil,scraps of stanzas in hidden notebooks,my own hastily scribbled voice in the air,all a fruitless attempt to turn roving wildflowers into a neat garden of producefitting orchids and flax and cosmos into the skin of an unripe apple.

 I am she that stumbles through a cacophony of blossoms and blooms,A greenhouse humid and hot yet fragrant and ambrosial,Vibrant multicolored thoughts tangled with passing perceptions,Pushing against the panes of glass.

Have you weeded through the garden? Presented pain and pleasure in curated bouquets?More weeds will sprout every time, more will die.

I know the constant, ever-changing earth.Earth of infinite little seeds scraping for sunlight,Earth of weeds and wildflowers,Earth of apples and neat fruits to be picked and laid out in white wicker baskets,Earth of limitless variation,Earth of my own mind.

You have offered me boundless expression, therefore I offer you bounds.I speak not as the farmer but as the florist, my mind has farmed for me what I now must arrange and present as neat words on flimsy scraps of paper.I scratch my pencil digging for stanzas like tubers, dirt collecting under my fingernails as I scrape through the fog of my thoughtsTo put on paper what is impossible to put on paperLyrics to the song of myself, to be plucked on a lyre as they were once plucked from the ground.