I am a poet with no poetry. Words caper through my mind delighting me on colored wings then fluttering up as a flock of beautiful birds to vanish over the horizon.
I am a poet whose poetry is wild, free, uncaught. People say these words are precious. I should take a notebook like a net and capture them before they fly from me.
Scattered scrawls on paper from cramped hands, their frozen beauty a mere shell of their truth.
Later, transcribed in the digital perfection of binary code and winging their electron way across the cyberspace they are more esthetic yet I capture the beauty of their flight only as well as a photographer captures the painful longing of geese lifting from a morning-still pond in autumn.
These captured words are no more precious to me than the delightful brown sparrows, enlivening the winter trees beyond my windows. My cramped hand cannot capture these phantom glories. They fly. Ephemeral words lost in a noise of life. Their beauty leaves joyous wing-prints in the snow of my memory, frozen, yet alive.
I pick up my broom and continue my work, sweeping up the debris of life.