This morning I said to my poem,

impatiently waiting to fly out into the world,

“not now, can’t you see I am going out to do my chores!,”

But my poem did not care,  she said

I was just being lazy, “no getting lazy!,” she

said in her raspy and demanding voice,

“I have a right to live…

When God gave you the creative spark,

you promised to use it, so get busy,

or he will send a thousand Cherubim to burn your cheeks.”

I whined, moaned, pleaded,

“I don’t have the strength or the time right now,

I can’t wring another drop out of this long day!”

Sometimes my poem ignores me, sometimes

she responds, and this time,

she climbed up onto the dining room table,

she lifted her skirt, winked, and shouted out

to the sky, and the ceiling fell on both of us,

and I said, “OK, OK,” and went to work.

And the moral of this poem is this:

An impatient poem cannot be reasoned with,

it just must come out.