NaPoWriMo #5: A Revision

A real re-vision, though — I’ve smashed together pieces of two other unfinished poems.  Not satisfied with the ending.  But more satisfied with what I’ve got now than what I had before.

Heat Wave

 

I’m stranded on August’s flat tar roof

with only a cheap, generic popsicle

and a relentless song stuck in my head:

Oh no not I, I will survive,

boring into my brain like a mole,

its insidious whiskers making me crazy.

 

These weeks creep by like sadistic turtles,

and summer puddles around my ankles.

I wish I could hurl a dart at the map of the world

and transport myself someplace Nordic and crisp,

but the best I can do is open the National Geographic,

ogle centerfolds of icebergs and oceans,

or press the cool, glossy pages to my forehead.

 

October is unimaginably distant –

like a language I once knew

and spoke fluently on a mythological continent

where the north wind tore confetti from the trees

and fallen apples softened, bruise by bruise,

and sunk down into mulchy scented paths.

 

I dream fragments of that lost city as I fester

between the fevered sheets

of this stalled-out summer.