Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

cravings for depth
twenty thousand leagues deep
uneasy trigger-finger wiggles like live bait,
I dip my toes into the river of adrenaline

I'm looking for my cosmic car keys
I dropped them in an open manhole to the sea
and I keep writing about this odyssey
this inexplicable journey, and this

quest to tear the room apart
trash this space !...God Damn It !
I know it's here somewhere,
in the pages of a yellowed paperback, or

perhaps inside the vault of a Prince Albert tin,
rusting under the box-springs ....or maybe sewn
into the lining of a time-traveler's Kevlar vest ?
I seek...The Hidden, old as a children's game

I wish I could write a poem with razor insight
lush with news from the front, of the battle
for wisdom, I wish I could write a poem
with answers that soothe the soul like aloe vera

or night-blooming jasmine hanging over the fences
of a sea-weathered shack in Key West, Fla......
a poem that might linger inside the nostrils
for a few months....but alas.....all I can do is wish

lost my cosmic car keys
nostrils breathing in soot
exhale placed to win


Steve, another gutsy piece. I can only wish I wrote it!

thanx for the creative and kind words judih
Write On !

actually you have a good poem here. Though you may be consciously frustrated---in your own evaluation---you do a lot with that frustration. The car keys metaphor is excellent. I can identify with that---everybody can. And I like the sea-weathered shack in Key West---where Hemingway lived and Wallace Stevens visited (and got in a fight with Hemingway). You are having a fight with your self and you have come out of it victorious in this poem. The poem may not be a fulfilment of your wish but it is an expression of the struggle----and really a good expression of it.

thanx very much dan
appreciate the details

My own misfires vastly outnumber the hits - the stories are all so compelling in my head, the poems so eloquent... but when I finally get around to clothing them in words... not so much. Every once in a while something comes alive, but all too often the best I can achieve is Ordinary. Sort of like industrial R&D, which is mostly a matter of eliminating all those things that don't work so you'll know what NOT to do. The Eureka moments are few and far between (but so, so sweet)...