Like Dylan in the Movies

I've lost things.

Like scattered scarves

flinging themselves out of an

old suitcase, popped open on the dusty road,

dropped from the top of a dirty station wagon.

The colors have all flown away,

pretty balloons with my once-thoughts

snug in their helium centers.

Not unlike what it is to bite into chocolate

and find it full of raspberry,

it is like this when I once had thoughts.

When my thinking was free-form swimming

in the olympic-sized swimming pool

my brain was held, a frazzled and wary

YMCA. It is a puddle now, I would suppose,

drying on the side of the same lonesome road

from which the scarves have wriggled away from.

I admire the colors they once turned and the

spectacular bursts of hazy light-play

that dappled new spring leaves,

I had thoughts that embodied this.

I could taste the bitter young tea plants

on my tongue as I thought like steam.

In seeing for miles, there no fields of tea leaves,

no balloons hanging in the sky,

suspended as thought by fishing line.

There are no scarves with patterns and

sun shining through like early morning curtains.

There are dusty shoes and locked suitcases

to which I have lost the key.

There is my hourglass which somebody

has glued to the table and it ticks off the

grains until there are no more in the day

and I cannot flip it over myself.

My thoughts run like rivers to the sea

where I am not, nor ever shall be it would seem.

And what is this avant-garde pair of scissors

and roll of tape I am so consciously searching for?

What will this do to make amends with the running away of things?

The carrying off of these standard desires, to think thoughts

manifested by the necessity of poetry.

Like a painter paints to live,

through his art he is whole,

so it is with these poets who write to

make sense and to think clearly,

to make something, and themselves whole

and fulfilled. Like a full canvas,

a full poem makes the heart go numb.

What is the purpose of writing only to write?

To prove there are words on this page,

to prove that somewhere something was written,

though it may be absurdly abstracted and awful.

And so my work has been of late

in this place where I have no thoughts,

nothing has been able to be thought.

I want to write for the sake of writing,

I need to feel something stir in my soul,

and sometimes (most times, really) I can.

This great sighing heave of relief and fresh air.

Like I have awoken from drowning and have surfaced

the sea and taken in the good salty air.

But sometimes I remain lying flat on the sandy bottom

of where I drowned, once.

When writing becomes only writing.

Ceases to be my own true blood and mind

dashed out on the blank white space,

it turns up in black ink,

not red blood as it really should.

Properly, I would bleed out my words

direct from my soul.

If I could still feel correctly on a regular basis.

Sometimes these tenants in my heart forget

to pay their heating bill, electricity bill

and it all gets off and goes dark

and I am as lost as they are.

We fumble in the dark for some switch

that we turn on and off repeatedly,

though we know nothing will happen,

even if I found money for the bills

for the tenants in my heart.

With some post-modern glue

and a post-structuralist piece of paper

I might correctly fashion

something like what I am trying to say,

through this rambling sea of mess.

What I guess it comes down to,

on a basic level is,

I have forgotten how to think,

and I'm not sure how to fix that.

I have run out of supplies temporarily

to keep my brain's functions intact.

I have lost all scarves and balloons,

I must go and buy new ones

to shove in new suitcases as

we go bumping down this horribly dusty road;

you ought to roll the windows up, dear,

or the dust will get in your eyes.