The Back of My Mind (Poetry)

I have no problem chopping prose

I have no problem chopping prose.

Everybody knows it's useless when you want a poem.

I could amputate a gangrenous bough

and find somehow amid the loss

the quiet peace of poetry.

I could purge myself of prose

with its ugly unrhyming words,

its bloated paragraphs, fat and saucy,

pushed to the side of the road.

I have no problem chopping prose.

I privately behead before it goes

into the public ball.

But I cannot criticize my babies,

sweet smelling, ice-dancing babies,

with their pirouettes on graceful legs,

their elegant and gangly elbows,

forever adolescent

with seeds of perpetuation and of promise.

I cannot clip their wings. They must fly.