Rara Avis
Like all things related to screwballs
and misfits
I was born looking for a word
inside a clock.
Back then, time ticked loudly,
clocks ran faster than chipmunks.
Young bones were fueled by green grenades
plucked from low-hanging life-lines.
I needed words to save the world,
I needed a clock-case to store them in,
I needed speedbumps for my brain.
Mother said that If I lived to be a man
I would be all strewn about
like a crow-pecked scarecrow.
Eventually I discovered
a way to make words bespoke,
to give them meaning
outside of the hide-bound
and buckram dictionary.
Naturally I had to invent my own time-machine,
and had to surrender to a fanciful argot.
For a long while, only blithe revenants
and their little helpers
could read my tenuous tidings.
It was only when my pipsqueak prattle
had the effrontery to call itself ‘poetry’
that some said sadly
that I may be ever so slightly explicable.
Alas mother was right, there is only the clock,
and it runs on mechanical words,
and so I remain a rare bird
bamboozled by age-worn chalk-talk,
a jargon that refuses
to jump out of its own skin.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2020
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