ARS POETICA (capitalized for emphasis) ((a college poem about poetry))

More often than not you will find language will bow for you

Put your palms on a notebook you filled as a child and with enough intention the push will bring up sentences and phrases you'd forgotten

More likely, it will be like a cheap, faux leather sketchpad your grandmother picked up in the Seattle Airport, but who is to say that is all it is?

You have not yet reached the seven year mark, when your skin has fully regrown--something inside you will remember, cells that held the ink that sloughed onto your fingertips

Mor(tifying) though it may be to admit to the weaknesses of your own brain, the words will come when they come

They will not bow down, and they will not bow with you

Take a synonym between your fingers--first and thumb--and squeeze until the juice (mango sweet) comes out

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,"

"Hope is the thing with feathers--"

These passages were not written for you or with you in mind but nobody said that you could not take an old stanza you scratched on a restaurant napkin and taped into your airport jot-pad

and mash and mold the words until the squishy parts shine

Language is always waiting to drip its juices onto an awaiting tongue

Yours or mine or whoever I am writing to, whoever I mean