Poetry 101

Poetry 101
Oh, you Great Einsteins of poetic genius,
You, my ancestors, my poetic origin,
Reach down and steady my hand.
Teach me the inexact mathematics,
The unfathomable science,
So I too can be an engineer of words.
Make my fingers your puppets
And pilot them into new lands
Of exotic eloquence
Because I am just a baby poet,
Writing stick figures to life,
And scratching out words
In chalk on the pavement.
All the while,
An inscrutable world
Is spinning in the darkness
Utterly outside the grasp of poems
Finger painted into nebulous chaos,
Everything crudely taped and pasted
Leaving only Frankenstein’s
Malformed monster where
There was once a desire to capture life.
Regan Tindell