The fault, if there is one, lies in the way
my days keep shedding parts of speech.
Loose nouns roll under the furniture.
Verbs are still warm from use.
Adjectives get up my nostrils
whether they’re sweet perfumes
or rotting stench.
Even the adverbs cling like burrs.
Punctuation is all over the place.
I bump into quotation marks
and those oddball semi-colons.
I trip over commas on the floor.
Cut me. Please do.
You’ll see that what emerges
is not blood but a clause, a syntax.
Dig further and you’ll come up with a handful
of half‑formed paragraphs.
With any luck, they’ll still be breathing.
I didn’t know, back when I first
slipped into a book, that it was an IV line,
a drip-feed of people talking on buses,
or quarreling in kitchens,
or riding to the rescue
or wrapped up in the satin sheets of romance.
Every gesture they made left a bruise
in the shape of a sentence.
Call it a birthmark. My mother, carrying me,
startled by a sponge, or an encyclopedia,
or a poet declaiming to no one in particular
on a park bench. Something lodged early.
So who’s to blame when language
flutters around my skull
like moths drawn to a porch light.
My head can only hold so much.
If I don’t empty it onto a page,
there’s the real risk.
My brain could bust.
Imagine the mess.
You’d either have to
clean up the spill or read it.
John Grey
(Image by DWB)
Saragun Springs 
John Grey deftly makes use of personification by imbuing parts of speech with vibrant life. And he makes it all seem so effortless! Both whimsical and poignant. Well done, John!
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Hello John
Yes, to grab all those words. To arrange, rearrange, sort, omit, give a second chance, pull again, more sorting, a third chance…your poem speaks of it well.
Leila
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Inventive, fun, playful and with genuine insight. I’m glad it spilled out!
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John
Good writers are spies in the enemy’s territory which is one reason why they often go unnoticed, even when practicing their craft at the highest levels. Such has been the case for many centuries, long before Shakespeare’s time, although Good Will surely perfected this notion of the good writer being the truly observing eye who is NOT observed by the enemy camp. Shakespeare’s extravaganzas were observed, while he himself was so invisible many otherwise rational people don’t even believe he existed as a writer at all.
This poem takes the measure of what it’s like to live a life in the world of words. I can almost imagine this poem as being in Shakespeare’s voice, or maybe Christopher Marlowe’s. Anyway, I think they would’ve liked this. Thanks for sending your work to the Springs.
Dale
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