The Desert of Dreamsmiths

A Poem by Marshall

They said the world was paved with opportunities
oh yes it was. Businesses of all kinds
Both good and bad, sliding in and out of your conscience self
effortlessly. Writers of all kinds gathered in a pool
of subscribers, hoping for their craft to catch the eye
and gain the comments that so elevated them to pedestals
of happiness. Pain was ignored. Pain creates joy?

I was different. I came with words, worthless in themselves
staccato butterflies that grazed the slim lines of poetry
and migrated south of the border to lie in a wasteland
of dead pupae and broken wings. Yet I was not afraid
to say so. Words are worthless-no matter how you look at them.

But sing them out, dance them in a dream, play
the orchestra with its flawless symphonies
and magically those worthless words take flight
couched in the wings of music soaring above
the desperate denizens of waste paper baskets
into opportunities of hope and lust and longing.

I love words. I treat them carefully, dress them in silk
and satin, paint their fingernails, don eyelashes and
red berried lipstick and kiss them into rhyme and rhythm
walk them down the street, heads turning and
store them in books, songs and minds
in a library of conquests of body and soul and when the day
is done. I forget them. Not one of the thousand poems I wrote
can be recited. Butterflies migrating to the swamp of reincarnation
where lie millions of other poems that never saw the opportunity
of musical flight.

I love words and I hate them. Its a relationship
like Jekyll and Hyde. Two shadows, two voices,
one sound with too many accents, yet they mean so much.
I could write the music for every poem but I'm tone deaf.
I need to see the eyes of reader sparkle in the frenzy
of reading and then I know my opportunity to write
was not wasted, loved not littered about
not defeated and languishing in another dry desert.