Poems, Interrupted

My poems want to begin, lately,
with waking from a dream,

at dawn, midnight,
3 am or other
portentous digits.

The words insist on that
inherent drama, dance
between two worlds,

the bridge that must be crossed
over moisture, under fog,
as if scrutiny can’t land there
and call out my penned donations,
one by one, into the light and
the critic’s laser eyes.

I wonder if I mother them,
those poems in process,
too much, too long,
which is relative anyway

like the average age of weaning
worldwide is four years old,
and in my country
it’s six months,
and what does that say about us?

You see how I diverge, I spin off,
deflecting hard attention
from the question at hand,
which is

am I smothering the poems
keeping them from emancipation
until they are
somehow perfect,
perfectly formed?

and

will all my lyrical children
perish from lack of sunlight

or,

if they do grow up
will they resent me forever,
end up in years of therapy,
succumb to addictions and
waste away,

quite far
from the eyes and ears
that might have seen their beauty,
or seen beyond their tired
dream analogies and loved,
or liked them anyway?

–Melinda Coppola