the empty field of page

arriving, settling the mind, setting myself to the act

the mere act

the clear fact

of fashioning meaning from synapse, pulling memory from the meat in my skull

i expect easy elegance, as though it were somehow my right

or some innate undeniable talent

to simply pull beauty together without effort and place it ever so

ever so

down upon the empty field of page

but poets are not born, they are fashioned, crucibled

i have filled my cistern overfull with the words and images of others

my faculties of reading so developed, so strong that i mistakenly imagine

i am one of them, yet i am

rigourless,

rudderless,

i lack craft, a craft upon which i might sail the sea of image

a craft that might bob up and down upon a mirror of stars

sails already hoisted, anchor eschewed

many is the time i've boasted that metaphor is my homeland

my passport unstamped, expired, unrecognized

all so many words, ideas, nothing in the doing of it

all motion and no action