Self-inducing Cyphers

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Great lines not self-fulfilled will seldom come.

If lines to do not fulfill themselves, no life

Will fill them.  Circumstance may make them dumb.

Those caverns in the mind aligned with strife

Will be engulfed with prose, pounds

And dollars.  Maybe worse will be if friends

Show up to bark and sniff—a pack of hounds

That seek their snuffling, unimportant ends

Among mere undergrowth where lichens grow

Instead of roots of limbs like Satan’s tree,

The Tree of Evil Knowledge lacking glow

Of guiltlessness, its serendipity.

  The lines desired to speak within a hole

    Of rivers; best, though, if they have code’s soul.

~ Phillip Whidden