An Essay Poem

By Sam Hanson

Sometimes, the idea of transparency

Is dangerous, surrounded by glass walls, And obsessed: (it picks up the pen) with sestina Who starves behind her iron bars, a tier Above freedom. And I inside a mirror, paranoid by the eerie sound Of truth, who burrows under the mossy poem: my antithesis.

That was my introduction, now for my anti-thesis: Am I an essay or a poem? A transparent Claim or a gypsy seer sounding My fate? For if you believe in a poem, well, You believe in anything, little boy, who gazes from a tier, Who bounds in boundlessness, who eats sestina

(it likes the taste of essays) after his siesta. He is stubbornly and devoutly anti-thesis And weathers like the storm on the Great Western Tiers, sitting atop this indent, sans parent. (long words dribble down its mouth) sesquipedalian pleonasms wall Him indoors: He attempts his essay, sounds

A howl at the prompt: A fowl sound

Indeed. (it pries open double space font) he vegetates over sestina, Ponders the heavy rhythm of silence echoing off walls, (it runs on New Roman time) awaiting the violin’s thesis

In Sibelius, but finds none, he trembles against the string’s transparency,

The surface mirroring a failed artist, and now the boy is punchdrunk at the edge of a tier,

Teetering on dissonance, at the edge of tears

Waving at his fifth paragraph chugging across the sound. But the ship sees him in distress, distorted by apparent Fog, it radios on all frequencies, but all it hears is sestina,

Recited from a war-torn mind - an undeclared war - the thesis

Lost in the depth along the margins of storm walls,

Yes, a storm is coming. And I, lost in thunder and walled In by cascading arpeggios, driving, my tires

Spewing up discarded consonants, searching the lined road for a synthesis. But thunder strikes the page (the ultimate critic) who wakes the fragile artist from an unsound Dream, and boy is swept away by words, desperately holding on to sestina, And the storm wall breaks and any notion of transparency

Shatters: my antithesis whispers away in a wall of my making, Shaking from the violence of transparent order, the boy’s hand reaches from the tier, Grasps a radiant sound, lets go of sestina, whispers away.