Winter, Hospital Bed

Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor

Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain

Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide

Where images flickered and ran on

I didn’t write poetry for publication

In those days but to grab the attention

Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life

Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches

Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways

For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction

Chips of memory kept rising to the surface

Of our minds to take another bite

I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me

It clung to my brain in the damaging climate

A creature in the alien element of air

Arising from centuries of survival

Thoughts must be inky and capable

Of working the bait with a black beak

For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss

Poetry in those days was a handmade lure

There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines

To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment

Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye

While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number