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This is not a poem.

Is barely something to sing, to dance to, but we’re dancing nonetheless, aren’t we?

We’re swaying along in the breeze and it’s…magnifique. This is not a poem—it’s written in prose, has got perfect paragraphs, you see! It’s got no meter, only a half-hearted rhyme, and that’s fine, because this is no—you get it, I know.

In the silence of the words that don’t make it, the lines we cut away, in the existence of non existent graves, lives a poet. Poet cannot speak, you see, and the bleak shadow of stifling grief casts overhead, weeps, dreams, sleeps. There is nothing that breathes there, nothing that wreathes together the flowers of despair, unaware how the thorns might sting the king of that crown.

The King wears it once, bleeds out on the throne and is gone. This is not poem, I know, but it’s a story nonetheless. Everything often is.

Red, says the setting sun, the King is dead! So they bring him to the grave of all words, to the point where nothing can be heard and anything is hardly said, no trees, no birds, not even leaves to crunch underneath. Find the killer! Find the thief of our pride and joy!

Nothing that breathes here, nothing that wreathes the incriminating crown. But they take half a dozen men to find someone to hang. Or we could burn him, says one. Skin alive, suggests two. Boil! Or drown! Or something even more horrifying, suggests one of the kind ones. It’s all very important, they think. Deciding on a punishment proper to fit their rage. Maybe an eternal cage!

They find nothing—that is to say, they find a poet, sitting on a grave of words, no birds, no flowers, no speech. Nothing breathes, nothing wreathes, nothing is here, can’t you see!

This is not a poem. Anything hardly ever is. But we’re dancing anyway, look! There’s a pair of feet that peek out of dark fabric swirling, curling around the edges of a dance floor.

We can’t stop, see, there’s nowhere hard to stand. Its unfair, the air for ground, unbound, un-tethered as we swing about. There’s no rest here, nothing’s left but moving feet, empty air.

Poet is hauled away in chains. There’s no one else to blame. The thorns can never be seen, never known but for the rose. Its a lost cause—that all this pain must be beautified. But its the only way to survive.

There’s no poem here, all the music has gone, we dance away in silence and the poet is executed at dawn.