No more poetry for me.

QUITTER BY DAVE MORRISON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 06

I’m through.

I mean it this time.

No more pictures taken with the word-camera, no more rough sculptures chiseled with observation, no more melodies played on the junkyard xylophone of old emotions.

No more poems about children with elderly eyes and bird-laughs, so fragile and indestructible, so filled with the promise of evolution and doomed with 10,000 years of bad DNA, like that little one there in the blue coat, clutching the dirty stuffed dinosaur.

No more poems about young lovers, like amateur boxers lacking the blind hunger to win or the experience to lose gracefully.

I’m done.

I retire.

I’m through coupling those long freight trains of words, or searching for the right way to describe something that defies any description crafted from the papier-mâché of language. A sunset is not smeared lipstick, not a crimson parfait or bloody bunting swagged across the empty stage of the sky —it is a sunset, and the art is in seeing it.

No more …