Monogamy

It seems to me that

the art of poetry

is much like

the art of sex.

.

Inspiration favors those who faithfully fill notebooks

   with so many scrawled lines,

late-night-pages sated with threadbare simile,

our metaphors as familiar to each other now as

   nursery rhymes –

agreeable in their predictability.

.

Every once in a while –

      (anniversary poems usually)

   –  the imagery slinks uneasily towards melodrama,

ill-fitting verse slipped straight from the thesaurus

   and massaged clumsily into meter,

Arguably impressive in form

   but making for vaguely awkward reading.

.

And those ambling streams of consciousness   

   cursiving tipsily from couch to bed,

stepping over the pencil notes strewn everywhere –

   stars and question marks,

   lines under and lines through,

–  mess of the day’s annotations twining around

   the body of the text.

.

There they are now,

all those mismatched volumes  

   we’ve collected over the years,

thousands of unremarkable lines

   resting solidly on the bedroom shelf.

.

Yet even from over here at my desk,

   I can see the dog-ears,

the fringes of old receipts and sticky notes

   marking favorite passages.

Those ones where the words shoved us up against

   the guest bedroom wall while the kids were napping,

shocking us with a poem so raw

   we spent the rest of the day dizzy

from the secret thing we had written.