Rotting on the Vine
/
They asked me where poems hide.
Standing out on my back porch
(generous name for a slab of concrete
surrounded by the summer's overgrown garden
rotten tomatoes wrapped in weeds)
listening to music
through earbuds that enjoy bungee-jumping out of my ears
smoking the pipe I bought
because it looks like the one Grandpa smoked
and sometimes a fragment of a lyric sticks awkwardly
or some small frustration of the day
an irritant like sand under a contact lens
is coated like a pearl with the bile of a dog-eared thesaurus
and poems come out of the fetid earth.
Standing out on my back porch
(generous name for a slab of concrete
surrounded by the summer's overgrown garden
rotten tomatoes wrapped in weeds)
listening to music
through earbuds that enjoy bungee-jumping out of my ears
smoking the pipe I bought
because it looks like the one Grandpa smoked
and sometimes a fragment of a lyric sticks awkwardly
or some small frustration of the day
an irritant like sand under a contact lens
is coated like a pearl with the bile of a dog-eared thesaurus
and poems come out of the fetid earth.