I will write and it will write me.

I will write a pomegranate making

light spill across your table

and when umbrellas glazed with light are like salt and pepper shakers under

rain-shaken Chicago stars, falling,

falling, as we all fall through our coping-webs

and land in our screams ringing

inside our mysterious heartminds.

I will write a screenplay and

who says I can’t write a novel on

my bedroom walls, who says no,

for I will show it to the bewildered landlord

and I will write right on down the sidewalk

writing my crazy novel too whipperwhole for a typewriter

and too fragile for words to hold on paper.

I will write war-whoops and ballads

and I will write all night on a Metra

and I will write sonatas and sonatinas

and I will write inside hot air balloons

and I will write on Santa’s lap aboard an airplane wing

looking at life like a lion looks at a ladybug,

finding poetry in the way a drunk man eats a marshmallow

and in sticky preschoolers using sleepover nailgloss,

and in the sweetsingers roaming my street.

I will find poetry and it will find me

sweaty and staggering down the escalator

lugging my dormant freight of strollers and ideas.

Poetry is a pumpkin and I will carve it

till the scent of seeds and strings makes

your nostrils trill like a new saxophone,

till the pumpkin shell is hollow for Halloween pie,

till the holes carved in the pumpkin

fill up with candles.

I will stand in awe

as the fragile light

escapes the cracks of poetry

and like a rocket

reaches beyond the sky.