My pen bleeds it’s sickly sweet dewfall drawl.

Nothing inhabits this canister but dried up vowels

fit for lying salesmen and puffed up politicians.

 

The birds have picked clean the grain,

and the road is left clean enough

to walk on without sound.

 

The deer have stopped coming to taste

the salt lick that once bore the strident residue

of something that helped hold their water.

 

I’m feeding the fish with sawdust

one pinch at a time. They’re only fat

because they’ve had to eat each other.

 

Unbanish the bright and flowing nerves of pulsating ink.

Let breathe again the salacious, the rambunctious,

the florid and foul, the simple and bombastic,

that tickle, cajole, prance and pet

and set free the smallest fires.