Only Beginnings

How to do with words

What Picasso did with lines

Give birth to new worlds

In meter and in rhyme

Cut gaping holes in all we know

Then fill them with denial

Twist and turn each sentence

Until meaning is defiled

Take the reader by the hand

Shove her out the door

Write from emptiness alone

We don’t need her anymore

There never was a reader

There never was a poem

Only burning thoughts and dreams

Born and dying all alone

Certainly Picasso

Burned the bridges in his dreams

He had to give up all he knew

To burst his boundary seams



He had to leave all use-to-be’s

Escape all he had been

Slam the door on well worn paths

Never to be walked again

There never was a forest

Never arms and legs to lose

Never paints and brushes

No direction from the muse

Only beginnings