Winter, Hospital Bed

Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide Where images flickered and ran on I didn’t write poetry for publication In those days but to grab the attention Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction Chips of memory kept rising to the surface Of our minds to take another bite I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me It clung to my brain in the damaging climate A creature in the alien element of air Arising from centuries of survival Thoughts must be inky and capable Of working the bait with a black beak For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss Poetry in those days was a handmade lure There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number