Coleridges

all artists are Coleridges
with their dreamy art projects and poems
already completed in their overheated heads
spitting it all out
spitting it all out on a page or a piece of rock
stuff that has been gurgling inside for two weeks
and just then, just then when
you’re about to cough up the diamond
the roses with all those delicately painted thorns
carried by those courting young men
in their wrinkled jackets
the postman knocks with an express package
that you just have to have
and you open it
and find a garden of trees loaded with cell phones
lap tops dripping like pine cones
the larger the tree the smaller the cone
and you’re just so happy as you fly over the
Himalayas in your nylon parachute
that you forget your retching
and when you finally remember, you can’t
spit out the diamond rose
with the thorns that are really lighthouses
off the coasts of your Phoenician ancestors
you can’t replay that opium movie
that capsule of reality
on the deck of the first colony ship to Mars
so you keep on engorging and vomiting
you keep on because
you are the keeper of the mountain
the place where all humans
and intelligent elephants and parrots go
to feed the cells that hold them up
long enough to live forever
an ocean that can’t believe it is an ocean
that can’t believe its tidal nature
its distant, distant nature
so distracted by new contraptions
stories of miracles lost