"Scribblers Everywhere" by Dean Young

Elizabeth Chiles, On My Mind Again (2014)

Scribblers Everywhere

Least the world go blank.
Fury of the inward mind.
Moment the teacher turns to the blackboard
from the feral faces. What can’t be said
in person and what can’t be said at all.
First sentence wrong. First word off.
The umbral blot out and spectral erasure.
Doesn’t everyone have a great uncle
who died in the bin, whose papers
are still in the attic, a sort of trans-
cendentalist? And a nephew buzzed on Lorca, 
dive-bombed by Ginsberg, who will never
be employed? There’s not that much difference 
between writing a novel and drumming your fingers 
but try drumming your fingers for six hours
a day for five years! Poetry at least
can be brief as shooting yourself in the head. 
Spring rain..bang! Shall I compare thee...
gray matter on the page. It’s easy,
just stare at a blank page until a unicorn
explodes from your brow. Until Rachmaninoff, 
until parthenogenesis. Remember
spending all Thursday in your pjs,
only getting out to walk the dog
who voluminously sniffs the epic
of lawn and pole, adding a few pee-cantos
of her own? There are two kinds of writing:
that which has a clear thesis
like too much sun can harm one
and that which makes any thesis a joke,
a rock skipping over a sea-monstered loch,
a spark lurching roof to roof. Let us not,
on our mortal coil, in our burning bean field,
our countdown, forget to praise.
Praise the erupting anthill, the spray-painted 
overpass, the inventor of eggnog if we can find her. 
Praise what we can’t find, praise spring rain,
praise bang! Apollo, patron of healers
who is also mouse-god of plagues.
The world proceeds with no design.
Design is its paw-print in the snow,
its blast-site, night-light, lost watch,
arranged bones. Design is the world’s prosody,
wreckage and dragonfly, bloom and boom,
its croon. I love you I’m not sure this helps 
but it’s written in crocus, the flaming halo 
above the birdhouse, monkeys with droids, 
donkeys with paintbrushes, breeze over wheat, 
excessive vowel open and glottal stopped, 
elided, howled, crumpled drafts under tinder, 
your lightning’s fingers in the leap
and fidget of my nerves.

Dean Young¹

1. Collected in Dean Young’s Bender: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press).