How does one become as
wise as the clouds? To be
seen in all your frogness,
your sharkness, your four
leaf cloverness, it's a type
of cleverness that I can only
respire to. Watch two movies
and eat three handfulls of
popcorn. Get a haircut that
you can be unhappy with.
Take comfort in your unhappiness.
Look at the passers by and develop
the cobblestones with your shoes.
Provide prescriptions in your poetry
and do not follow them closely, forget
them after you have scribbled them
on a proscription pad. Change the
names of things and the structure of cliches.
Do not use accent marks when they feel like too
much work. Who knows the keyboard shortcut?
Do not come forward. The clouds are suggesting
a vague connection between the color blue
and the rain. I want so bad. I want so bad
to write words that rhyme with rain,
associatively. Is Freud giving me permission?
Is John Ashbery? They both discovered things
and developed myths from the deep well
and a bucket. A bucket, that is, on a rope
that goes as far down as a rope can hold
into a human mind.
Roman Ryan 