A Failed Sestina

I awoke from a long dreamy nap with the word "sestina"

slithering across my brain, a brain dripping with Dickens' use of ink,

ink smeared all over his industrious characters, one, a body

never touched by the pen yet dragged from a river

coughing up lukafish, nonetheless. A ghost

of a fish, so I hear, hollow, insubstantial, without images.



Me? I want to write poetry where there is none; where images

snake around each other hopelessly biting at the ends of each sestina,

a line of tiki torches dancing some jerking rhythm for a pilgrim ghost . . .

Sigh. But it's all empty shadows, anyone can see--no secret-decoder ink

needed to decipher a millennium of mediocre dreams. A "sub-conscious river"?

Bah. All unravels, sure, meaninglessly, yet urgent, from this ageing body.



I wrote the name of Dickens once upon the waves and bones of my body;

the way I cocked my head and feigned curiosity-I thought he'd like the
images.

I was in graduate school without yet questioning-a fluid river?

No. I read about a black kettle, a calendar, and an ocean-setting sestina.

I had never set line on Warrior's ink,

not the way Maxine carved a grudge of blood upon the muscle of a ghost.



At six I believed rain and branches scratching at window panes would conjure
the ghost

of a boy who fell from the fifth floor and broke his small brown body

into a million pieces; now, after all calculations, I yearn to be visited,
to translate into ink

all that I fear-not wasting words on forced, fragmented images

that will never quite fit together, never fall into some mystical sestina,

never evoke the dread of a dirty Dickensian river.



Like a catch, like a school of pale, one-eyed cod netted from the nearest
river,

the writing becomes a bit repulsive to all but the most peculiar little
ghosts

who lurk behind round lanterns, knees drawn up, brow-lines marching a cruel
sestina.

I get lost. Forget the path. Find something new. "The writing of the body"

becomes repeated into oblivion. I almost fail to see, to recall the lustful
images,

the implications, of the mirror. The mirror! You age-old surface refusing to
absorb ink.



In the mirror, calligraphy tools set; I want to learn, only cannot moisten
the ink.

Cannot neatly package what isn't there. Effortless. Clean. The old rowboat
coasting down river.

Pointless, no doubt. Learning an entire language consumed by images.

Staring at the lines, all fat and thin, blurring into terpsichore, not
round-eyed anime ghosts.

It's not a wonder, not a supernatural feat, that Dickens is read without a
body;

after all, it's true, a warrior poet should forsake the dullest blade named
sestina.



So, I never dream in ink, no, not really, nor allow just any past ghost

writer to merge into my murky river dreams that buoyant and direct my body.

I can't begin. Frightenly empty images. Cough them back out into a failed
sestina.