Scribble by Chad Lahr (Imitation #4)

My father said: be a man of honor.

Children know nothing of honor, they live

every day waiting for the next moment.

Just wait for years to pass and you’ll learn.

The second hand ticks, and the minutes pass

us by. Bye: never to be seen again.

Yet again and again they are lost to

the past. Forever passed, changing, going.

Slowly turning around, you notice you

have changed. I’m better? Worse? I’m in between

this discontinuous evolution

of progression fighting off regression,

detoxification-retox battle.

I wrote years ago to a friend: I will

live for something more. “Moor - to make secure.”

How can a cloud be more if it’s secure?

The dark cloud inside condenses and rains,

Then let it pour, let it out, let it go.

GO. Leave. Get out. Don’t you just run away,

You’ll see, see-saws must go up and then down.

They have a rhythm much like you and I,

Eyes fueled by a blaze inside that we fan.

(Yet I am still a fan, and I won’t char.)

What I’ve drawn is not so clear, we scribble

On our canvas and pass it off as art.

The jobs, the grind, sore feet, and broken skin

Hoping someone out there, up there, buys it.

(Just for a reason to scribble again)

So let us pick up that pencil again

And think of what comes next, heaviest lead?

Pour out your secrets in your own language;

A cipher that centuries cannot b.r.e.a.k.

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Pencil

BY MARIANNE BORUCH

My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.

Look, I told myself.

And waited to be marked.

Clouds are white but they darken

with rain. Even a child blurs them back

to little woolies on a hillside, little

bundles without legs. Look, my teacher

would surely tell me, they’re nothing

like that. Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.

She said: Respond to the heaviest part

of the figure first. Density is

form. That I keep hearing destiny

is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage

once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone

so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.

Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose

awry into her microphone, triumphant.

The figure to be drawn —

not even half my age. She’s completely

emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour.

Look. Okay. But the little

dream in there, inside the think

that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life

is charcoal, the wood already burnt,

a sacrifice.