A Visit To Poemville Poem by Lonnie Hicks

Come with me now
to visit the town
where all the Poems live.

There we have fine houses
carefully built
with words, verisimilitudes
and verbs;

wide open windows;
poetic friends waving from inside

some shutters are closed-
inhabitants moved on-
deleted.

Our streets
have funny names:
Heart Break and Bitter Regret
Love Lane and Candy Dates;
Shoulda and Coulda Avenue.

I have some verbs in the Infirmary
awaiting Transitivity;

The nouns are in the ICU
real unconformable in there;
lots of feelings in ICU-
good and bad.

There are the Orphaned Poems
where Imagination suddenly departed
leaving them dispirited and inspiration-less
They stare at me from their blank pages.

In our cemetery
are the dead and buried ones-
some poems you loved to death

but they just could not live alone
their Similes Similed-
got watered down too much
and they.
just passed away.

I buried them one by one
with a tiny cry
and goodbye;
maybe I loved them too much.

At the local Bitter Bar
all lined up Cowboy Style
are the One's Gone Wrong.

They drink too much of Stale Gerunds
and their Swaggering Participles
are off-putting to the many,
who walk past the Saloon Doors
where only their heads and feet
show;
no torso seen;
no body in them
to sustain
them as poems.

Some are in re-development
being re-conceived;
others are beyond rehabilitation;
not dead,
not alive
yet they sit on my desk
starring straight ahead;
nothing to say.

But here now
is the hospital
perhaps our happiest place.

Inside
new Baby Poems
being born'

their Baby Grammar
just starting.

As I write their first lines
I hear myself giggle.