What If We Were Poets?

Once again, a re-write of a very old poem from roughly 2010 - it had the same gist, but now it sounds more like a poet explaining poetry to a non-poet (kind of like the speaker is talking to the reader). I'm kind of happy with how this turned out.

Do you ever wonder what it's like to come face-to-face
with the planets? To curl your fingers in the air without
meeting thousands of plaster ceilings? What if I showed you
how to cross Saturn's rings, inhale the atmosphere of Venus?
You would enter the Earth (and it's a strange place to call home,
really) with ice crystals at the corners of your mouth and ash
clouds stuck to the insides of your fingernails. Let me tell you,
it's a beginner's worry that you'll burn up in the atmosphere,
but I've had helium and hydrogen daubed on the base of my tongue.

Oh, and do you ever brush past the windows on train carriages
and wonder what cornfields are like when they're your sky
and your Earth's crust? What if I took you to the white cliffs
of somewhere or other and taught you how to spread your wings
and not hit the ground? What if I showed you mazes, and became
the red threads around your thumbs? If you'll just trust me, I'll let you
see that getting lost should only worry you in jungles of concrete - holly
bushes and sea salt are perfectly pleasant things to vanish in. You're
collecting berries and puncturing them, purple stains on chilled skin.


And here's the main thing. Do you ever read the words Hemingway
bled out of his ink pens and wonder what it's like to exhale prose
and have poetry knotting itself around your knuckles and ankles?
That's the one thing you won't be able to taste unless you face it.
Does the word 'lyric' turn to lemon juice on your tongue, do rhymes
spatter the ground when you spit them out? Now, I don't want to worry
you, but if you open your veins to papyrus:

He puts pen to paper and bleeds a saga.

Supernova (someday, I will marry an astronomer, and we will dine on stardust)

But first, a general explanation! This is a re-write of a poem from roughly 2011 - hopefully, it's better than the previous one, which is pretty embarrassing. What I'll be doing in the next few blog posts up until my new stuff is posting my attempts at the thirty-one prompts, and re-writes of very old poems. At any rate, poem.

You are firing words into space at stars that will never understand.
Let them guess. Have you ever tried explaining to them that you'd like to
pluck them from where they stand to glue them to your ceiling?
They don't know you like I do. They don't know you're scared of the dark,
and comets and asteroids are tricky things. They'll burn a hole through your roof
so I hope you like the troposphere singeing your nostrils.

'What do you suppose stars do after they become supernovae?'
'They become neutron stars. Or black holes, I guess.'
You went quiet after that.

Maybe I should have said that they stay beautiful forever like Hollywood
would have you believe. I could have said that they blaze on and on
for as long as the universe wants to keep us held in the clutches of spiral
galaxies, that they linger on and become what makes up a newborn child
and the last breath of people who have seen eight decades and more. That
they filter down into the shells of your ears and become the fabric and sinew
of what dreams taste like. They taste like cotton candy, by the way.

'If you could be anything astronomical, what would you be?'
'I'd be a comet. No, an astronomer, to be able to see all of that.
Or maybe I'd be a comet and marry an astronomer. What about you?'
'I'd be a supernova. Beautiful, and then I'd hope to become a black hole.
When I go down, everything is going down with me.'