Sunday Evening

There is no poetry with me tonight.
So nothing is here, on this blank page staring
down my frustration with nonchalance.
What am I looking for? I don't
rightly know. Something, I suppose, to emerge
from underneath this thinness of wood
like a drowned corpse, or just a death mask.
I’m not ambitious
enough to expect sudden beauty
or to beat love out of a woman.

Memento mori-- it applies to poems as well.
Sometimes we should build monuments
for all those things we’ve forgotten to poeticize,
a tribute to our cut and broken Muse
who lost her tongue God knows where.

(and still it won’t be a resurrection,
just a clumsy re-enactment of what we wish
we were, a poet of one’s own life)

Still, nothing is here.
No, not nothing, but rather the absence of something,
yeah, that’s here. Like winter, apologies,
and hell.