The (de) Composition

Imagine Life.

Like stiff, crumbling toasted bread

With a tendency for softness at the center

And butter.

Butter yellow like sunshine on windy days.

Imagine Life.

And imagine what follows.

Not Death, but something more real.

Something more real.

Writing and Editing are entirely different talents

(I know because my Teachers told me so in classrooms with painted walls)

But Rewriting

(They ignored explaining because even Teachers get scared)

Is not for the faint of heart.

How can one try to alter what has been written

-Something Permanent-

And expect no trouble? No complications?

What happens as you cause the words to detach from their prison of paper

And float away into the narrow space between O and its tiny 2?

Where do they go? What happens to the sounds

You’ve displaced? And flopping around like dead fish,

The ideas uncompleted?

Rewriting is dangerous!

I’m not convinced it’s even possible.

Best to lay aside the whole thing and start anew.

Best to lay aside the pencil because it’s permanent.

Best to Write carefully.

Decomposing in the forest

Is my book of lyric prose

Page by page by page by page

Returning its borrowed words

To the poetry of rosy leaves and stark limbs

Like broken toothpicks and shoeless shoelaces and only one earring

Who cease to Be

But potential for something else

Something new

Something not made not broken not

Absent.

Something.