ode to the page

this page died...how long ago?....
once a living plant upon a planet
awash in green, then removed and
placed in a catacomb of arboreal layers
unfolding before me,
beneath the dagger point of this pen,
drawing blood upon the face of words
and ideas plunged deep into the flesh
of my mind, stabbing my thoughts
to release the slow spilling of speech
enshrined in the tomb of trees,
these pages, this poet-tree.

this page, now alive, brought to
animation by a magic plastic wand,
throbbing with the rhythm of thought sequences,
the staccato cadence of sentences
handed down from mind to fingers;
this page becomes a resurrected plant,
an ambition sprouting from a void,
a mission seeking an objective voice
telling of the union between that space
and this time; it is reborn from ash
becoming fire, burning the bridge
between rhyme and reason, it is
a reconstruction of life
patterned after the romance of seasons
peppering these printed scattered leaves.

this page is now a figured sculpture
of its own beauty, a monument to the moment-
this immediate being--it is a testament
to the tangible link between life and death,
between silence and breath, it is a reminder
that no matter is created nor destroyed,
only employed by the sculptor's hand
to turn mineral into bone, to churn water
from stone, framing thoughts into poems,
further forms of totems wrought from
all the things under the sun,
seen and unseen, heard and unheard,
known and felt.

this page becomes the map of me,
a maze inside the birth-death reenactment
trapped in a haze of ego confinement
released through the floodgates of
inspiration realizing the relation of a poem's
"creation" to its "creator's"
streaming conscious dream.