Head Or Tail

they say you cannot choose
what poems you intend to write
before you do

but there are poets who choose
all the time — their poems
bear their choices and bare them

to the world for everyone
to see but
I’m afraid I’m not with them

for as much as I intend to
knuckle down and seize the moment
for a specific picture of life

every time I end up
elsewhere as if there are indeed
muses or a muse seizing me

as I would have seized the moment
and I sit back and wonder when it is done
about who I was writing it for

as if there is an audience
for this — as if somewhere
there is a population looking

for this one — maybe
a population of one
maybe unborn or maybe dead

already from not having had this
so I bear down myself and write
what I am told to write

you will tell me otherwise and
I hope and pray for you
against the depredations of a muse

or muses who tend to go cosmic
or micro or just speak to you
about the violet energy in a room

while instead I speak of rocks
and dirt and the earth turning
like a mystery or something else

or something else
or something else
or even another thing entirely

for I don’t know that I will write
anything at all — to be truth itself
if I am to be sure of anything

it will be in a moment
after sleep and
there are never dreams in my sleep

only rivers and their fish
only stones eaten by the rivers
only an entire world in a single poem

as small as a coin to flip — heads
to go on to the poem and tails
to go on restlessly back to sleep

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

onward,
T