23

For today's prompt, write an exhausted poem. The poem can be a first person account of your own exhaustion, or it can describe the exhaustion of someone (or something) else. Heck, I guess it even could be about exhaust, huh?

Overwhelm

What would happen, I wonder,
if one more, or ten, or a hundred more students
needed linear perspective explained today. Right now.

Maybe I could do it
but already a blackbird has flown out of my mouth.
No one saw
Even I only felt it

Maybe I could do it
Go over it again
- where to look and why
what to try to see and what it could mean
what vanishes where and why

Look here, I might say,
pointing to my tongue
as my brain flings open
and flocks take flight
pouring through my senseless mouth
emptying my head
of wings and instinct
pressure and feathers
and hundreds and hundred of instinctual eyes
More and more empty my head
Obliterating the clear sky
scrubbing out sense in a collective shudder
of inexplicable wings

Look there, I might say, when I could speak.
Do you see that last bird
flying alone? There
above the dull, beige suburbs that recede
as if into infinity.

The bird looks peaceful.
Getting smaller.
But it isn't really
It just looks like it.
And in both truths there is something

- the divinity of the real.

For now,
just draw.

Ask with your pencil.
Please don't speak.