JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

So many of them, sprawling

on library shelves, squiggles

on newsprint, shouting in

a hundred tongues of black

yellow and red. On billboards,

love letters, stamped on door and

window frames, informing,

mumbling, cajoling, tempting, torturing,

whirling round your mind

like garbage spilled and

whipped up by a blizzard

 

You shake your head as patterns

once so familiar become Rorschach

skeletons, twisting and changing

in a mad dance of dialects

You’re a dyslectic in a foreign

opera, bewildered in a supermarket

of hieroglyphics, package and can labels

 

A dark snake writhes out of your

pen as you write, oozes over the page

there was something you wanted to say

so desperately. An idea, so simple

to get you out of all this confusion

 

The snake stares back at you. Hisses

In the distance a dog barks, a hyena laughs