Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

Truculent Ode to Poetry


You storm in
at the most inopportune time,
like when company’s coming
and the house needs cleaned
or when the presentation at work
looms large upon the horizon,
and in I walk into my office,
open the computer,
and there you are,
squatting like a protester
dressed in red in the snow
with something that must be heard
because you’re not moving 
until it is.
 
It is annoying, all this poetry.
It won’t let me sleep
until I’ve written each word down,
wrestling like Jacob in dead of night
only to find myself
limping toward dawn.
I’m tired of verbose ambushes
with exciting new ideas 
that too often go awry
like the perfect Scrabble word
mixed among the tiles 
if only the right ones can be drawn
but seldom are,
despite my planned hope.
 
It’s like living with someone
who’s bipolar, bouncing words about
like Sherlock Holmes on speed.
I can’t keep up with so much brilliance,
though I try to suss it out like Watson
and get it all down as a public service.
You run ahead, and I chase,
only to race in and 
find you suddenly slouched
silent and sullen on the couch
watching Law and Order reruns
and getting cheese doodle dust
all over the cream upholstery
of what’s left of my mind. 
 
Sometimes I’d like to tell you 
to shove off, leave me alone, 
but truth is, I enjoy the games afoot,
of hide and seek and chase
and Scrabble and wrestling
that leave me so breathless with beauty
amid dirty dishes and unfinished reports
that I don’t care when you’re here,
though in the back of my mind
I know you’ll soon
blow out the way you came
and leave me as a doldrums sail
devoid and drooping
alone. 

               ©Tess Lockhart, all rights reserved.  May, 2018.
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