Tricks

 I was playing cards against my own poem, penny a trick

and  

      had

            lost

                  thousands. 

"I brought you into this world," I began,

but she turned into a fog of lemon-fresh Glade,

then to a tiger wearing a bell,

and sat there smiling at me like a dime store Buddha.

She had the keys to me, that's the trouble,

and took them with her when she went. 

Strangers know me backward and forward

and I can only stammer at them, clueless and dizzy. 

She turns me to a gawky bird standing in the sawdust on one leg

while she builds her house around me. 

I am password protected, listed on the National Registry

and greenies stick spikes in me so she can't cut me down. 

I lay an ace and she

spreads out a peacock fan of kings and queens,

Russians and Persians,

lilacs and shade-loving violets.

I am playing cards with my own poem, stanza a hand,

and

       I

        am

             broke

but a newer poem brings me coffee, licks my ear

winds his slender self around me like a climbing vine as I

sweetly purr, "and I can take you out of it." 

_______

For Word Garden Word List -- T S Eliot.

Music: Josiah Bell Change In The Weather