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
poems 2 die for 