COMPULSION

COMPULSION

Oh that compulsion
know it too well!

De Vere
with voices in his head
seeking  the silence
of paper
    get the words out
dancing on a stage
before they
send someone to
hang the author
   guillotine them
(a seventeenth Earl
of Oxford) might
just survive
    
Shakespeare
needing money
to silence
his creditors
but a best bed so
he might bequeath
his current one

spend all day practising
spellings and signatures
scrawling
    fervently up
and down the wall

go on alternate media
you can navigate them
slip your ship
     between channel that
is Scylla
   and channel
that is Charybdis

find island of polished equanimity that
might, in
its absence, serve
as truth
allow bucketfuls of
free download
Information dumps to fill
every gap in every picture
hole
     in your argument

and there we are
positions intractable, titanic forces,
   seismic struggles bound
to tsunami drown us
or devise
       less topical death

big wave collapsing
somehow ricochet from
a bullet
    a butterfly fired somewhere

tiny chaos I had in mind
put an O down on the page
(hazarding a circle)
to
  at least make a beginning

amazed to see
the white of this ocean
storm, go
so beserk

    feeding of which
energy

easy for the poem to
write itself in
              delivering the rest