Inspirational Rhetorical Extremities

To depict what flowers in the cavern of a dream

requires powers you profoundly lack. Yours turn to steam

when they attempt the least verisimilitude – the barest stab

at calling up what really ‘was’. Faintly recollecting

ferris wheels and women’s faces and a little child’s open mouth

exhorts you to dig clumsily to search not for the dream itself

but for whatever cheap availing tricks might crowd

that dusty shelf marked “Inspirational Rhetorical Extremities.”

To riffle through this piffle means to weigh the merits

of a spooky movie’s tactics and the colors of the day-glo

bubblegum conundrum that comprise the cliché pellets of what

few details you constipatedly can call up from your childhood.

Rhetorical Extremities, these be indeed.

But nothing with a feeling that remotely moves you.

And yet (you block the facile rhyme that it behooves you):

you tell yourself to do it anyway: write and draw these

cumbersome contraptions with the only theory you think enjoys

the prospect of a certainty. Which is: you’re dreaming now,

and what you’re trying to describe in what you call your

waking hours, you have powers to depict.

(Even to depict the fact you can’t depict.) How?

Decant Miss Dickinson: “Tell all the truth

but tell it slant.” This sneaky law that governs

poetry and dreams and life is very strict.

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