Why I Don’t Write Poetry

A thousand faces covered in habitual landslides

Why I Don’t Write Poetry

Street dogs wag their tails at me, as if my heart were full of puppies. To others, I am covered in ceramic thorns. An earlier me, a doppelganger of imperfection, ran off with my sophisticated words years ago and left me an empty vessel, an intricately hammered chalice to fill with frogs and forests. In my emptiness, I wandered a labyrinth of primitive cities in search of illumination.

After rain, I dry my books and place them lovingly on my secret stone steps. I asked for this life when I was young. A time when trees sheltered me from the storms of tradition. Before I knew the sound of doors closing.

In only five hundred footsteps, when crowds trudge home from the time clocks, I see a thousand faces covered in habitual landslides. Then, in fear of conformity, I drop my pen into my porridge, refuse to suckle its ink.

A man came to me outside of town, where the desert whips each death a little faster, and invited me to listen, to close my eyes and crawl with my mouth full of fire over a sea of severed ears. Don’t write this down, he said. Just listen to how the earth itself, and its many splendid craters, can smooth the rough edges of your ignorance with the pure crackle of its belly.

Yes, I obeyed. It’s never been a choice for me. Still at times, I’d like to stand outside the word factories and shriek a proper sonnet. Instead, in search of my mislaid angel, I pass the time from hand to hand. I chase old streetlights all the way down to the principal plaza. I sit on a bench. The mountains to the east stare back at me, as if I were a tasty morsel of river to ease the wild hunger of their canyons.

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Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed. I found this piece buried in my forgotten archives. I hope you enjoyed it. Victor David

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