Come with me now

to visit the town

where all the Poems live.

There we have fine houses

carefully built

with words, verisimilitudes

and verbs;

we see wide open windows;

poetic friends waving from inside

some shutters are closed-

inhabitants moved on-

deleted.

Our streets

have funny names:

Heart Break and Bitter Regret

Love Lane and Candy Dates;

Shoulda and Coulda Avenue.

I have some verbs in the Infirmary

awaiting Transitivity;

The nouns are in the ICU

real unconformable in there;

lots of feelings in ICU-

good and bad.

There are the Orphaned Poems

where Imagination suddenly departed

leaving them dispirited and inspiration-less

They stare at me from their blank pages.

In our cemetery

are the dead and buried ones-

some poems you loved to death

but they just could not live alone

their Similes Similed-

got watered down too much

and they.

just passed away.

I buried them one by one

with a tiny cry

and goodbye;

maybe I loved them too much.

At the local Bitter Bar

all lined up Cowboy Style

are the One's Gone Wrong.

They drank too much of Stale Gerunds

and their Swaggering Participles

were off-putting to the many,

who walked past the Saloon Doors

where only their heads and feet

showed;

no torso seen;

no body in them

to sustain

them as poems.

Some are in re-development

being re-conceived;

others are beyond rehabilitation;

not dead,

not alive

they sit on my desk

starring straight ahead;

nothing to say.

But here now

is the hospital

perhaps our happiest place.

Inside

new Baby Poems

are being born'

their Baby Grammar

just starting.

As I write their first lines

I hear myself giggle.