“Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse
Colored by the way we all talk about it,
Self-critique tastes good! It’s a living, breathing
Dread, or super weak. In Ladino ballads’
Semitransparent
Writhing, things awry (in their plain, old sparkles)
Teach their parents’ envy, or my name isn’t
Paranoia Rex. All my retrocecal
Guidebooks reechoed
Singers’ faces, reached belowground until they
Pulled a suntanned soldier. A vision willing
To be willed is worth but a dot; the public’s
Molotov cocktails’
Evocation. Shooting a gun and crying,
Blessed One, fire’s best friend is a candle; it should
Never die not standing. Of gawsy pogroms’
Nurturing instincts –
Half-goats, playing panpipes – I’m not so sure. I
Wrote embarrassed (not, I regret, in Paris)
Letters to abasement, that woman fond of
Puns. A real doosra,
She’s my heart’s diaspora, Blessed One. Quillworts
Never feel their lack of omniscience or good
Looking. Reproducible glory needs what
Lovers transfigure,
Not deception. Awfully quickly, like re-
Visionist historians, Douglas firs help
Beauty conjure up its blank canvas by my
Kia Sorrento.