MISC

Where Literature so wilfully gets it wrong
Is in the themes and structures it creates
When life is much more miscellaneous than that:
A sea shell here, an acorn there, some cheese.
A knapsack full of happenstance, gathered and dropped
As markers on the one path we can never take. Back.
No story arc can properly plot the zig-zag bounce-abouts we get
At the hands of each day's pinball wizardry.
No carefully selected neat bandana'd bundle on a stick
Can carry all the courses of the feast.
Then there's the mint fresh afterthoughts.
Oh, and arcs by definition don't describe full circles anyway.

For some of us at least our travelogue reflects
The unanticipated tangents we go off on
And struggle to explain in trilogies of four or five or six
Or non-sequential chapters which we never quite get through
Completely to the open end.
It's a tale of bits and pieces sung in fragments:
The odd rhyme here or half rhyme there,
A metaphor or two to tell it like it isn't
Sometimes becoming verse,
A knapsack full of happenstance
Gathered.