• I wrote you a poem
    But then I threw it away
    It had begun fine
    But by the end had matched all the others
    One sad and gloomy thing
    Too brittle and too much like myself
    To give to you without guilt
    So I crumpled it into a neat little ball
    And threw it at the trash bin
    But as in most things my aim was untrue
    and I missed my mark

    I wrote you a poem
    But then I threw it away
    Again and again and again and again
    Writing and tossing and writing and tossing
    Until eventually I gave up
    And instead started a search for my pair of
    Rose colored glasses
    Said search lasted me hours until,
    In that endeavor too, I finally gave up
    The house a mess
    And I still without those pretty frames of thought
    Now I remember that they fell in the lake
    You were there too
    It was last summer

    I wrote you a poem
    But I threw it and more than a few others away
    Actually that’s a lie
    There were hundreds of them
    I burned them to ashes and dust and it was glorious
    Bits and fragments of word dust floating away in the wind

    Like freedom
    Like silence

    I am tired of poems, of speech
    Of my mind whirling and finding connections
    In things that I had never asked to find
    Little horror stories unfolding
    When what I had asked for was
    Sunshine and calla lilies,
    gold dust settling quietly on bookshelves

    So you’ll excuse me, I hope
    I wrote you a poem
    But I threw it away
    The words were ill suited and unkind
    So I threw it away
    And then I drew you a picture of lilies instead

    I won’t tell you how many pages
    I went through before I got to
    The one that was only just tolerably imperfect