Brooke Burns ars poetica

656 Words

Writers hunt poets like Buffalo.

They take the form of muses

and lick roughly at our lobes

Where DO the dead words of artists find their place among living souls?

Seekers taught by thriving intellectuals,

to master the English language in its most pure sense.

They were lead to Never Land where the time and space of innocence flourishes in the soil of fairytales.

They have struggled against dull Gods,

have sleighed drowning dragons.

Reaped the treasures buried deep in the belly of the brain.

I have colonized the child of my imagination, raped the virgin of my intellect, castrated the King of my character,

all with the glitter of a graphite stick.

I have fucked poetry.

I have fucked it up and fucked it deep. I have snorted lines of cocaine off the bindings of used, hard-covered poets. I have packed a pipe with the teachers of “Dead Poet’s Societies”. I have lit cigarettes with rage, hoping to breathe in the poison of new words.

I have yearned for poetic penetration and eventually settled

with the pink plastic battery charged kind of poetry that allows the most shallow dips of fulfillment.

I have scraped the curiosity from my uteris, and wondered if there would be any scars. I have had one night stands with Poetry and woken up with the big hairy beasts of myself. I have used protection when I shouldn’t have. I have taken the pill to trick my Poetry into thinking it was pregnant. I have bled on the face of Poetry and wondered at its disgust.

In years lost and found, poetry has remained

the God of my atheism. Perhaps my childhood was

a brimming cup of sweat tea,

served over ice,

with one neon lemon,

sliced through spongey flesh,

dripping puckers into my glass

alluding me to the sweet and sour

adult-hood that would permeate the Easter Bunny of my perception.

I wasn’t ready for what it/she/he/ had to offer

I wasn’t ready for the size of Poetry’s penis.

The slippery hymen of my imagination has yet to be ripped open.

What’s inside?????

Fear waits on the outside

looking into the sweating darkness,

waiting with a Hoover

plugged into an outlet

that pulses with power from nuclear facilities,

hoping to abort a promising fetus,

5 months after its seeded.

Meanwhile little sperms of imagination swim wildly in my water-park,

Going down slides, diving off high boards, hanging out in the lazy river,

drinking all natural, no sugar-added cranberry juice boxes, sunning themselves through the pores of my skin, taking steam baths in the saunas of my ovaries.

Maybe later a massage

and then maybe a nice visit from pink plastic pleasure

to end the day in the life

of an eternally, patient, waiting, gentle, innocent, sperm of poetic genius,

unaware of any future that awaits it.

Boy or girl? Gay or straight?

Which color of the rainbow? Will I be able to taste it?

Will there be an only child or will I bare a large family? My skinny hips tell me to settle down for just a second.

They say in unison, Miss Burns, this child ain’t coming through there (indicating my lower life-force). Somebody better grab a knife. And we’ll talk about that family of five a little later.

Of course, Fear is listening in

and upon hearing this candid warning proceeds to obtain a hanger, a rusty razor, and a hatchet (hope Mr. Paulsen doesn’t mind).

At this moment I am scared.

At this moment I am ready to die with rubbered hands and feet.

But

Suddenly

I

See

The Doctor.

He has many names. He tells me to call him Walt, or Wally works too.

He carries with him no medical briefcase, but a beaded medicine bag filled with the powders and elixers created by laughing children.

I wonder if Peter Pan had anything to do with this,

or maybe Robyn Williams.

BROOKE BURNS