14

For today's prompt, write a crossroads poem. This could be a poem about a physical, mental, or emotional intersection. For instance, graduating college or getting a divorce often leaves people at a crossroads. Or finishing a ginormous project at work. Or even starting a poem. After all, that blank page (or screen) offers so many new possibilities.


"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and your go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there be sure to get there just a little ' fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself…A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."

Tommy Johnson

What would it be like?
I've done this, but in the daylight,
not right before midnight

Stopped in the middle of a dirt road
(Van Gogh country)
like some animal
paying no mind to possible traffic
but kneeling down, recreating
the typical cypress lined landscapes of Arles
in branches, rocks

Someone would drive over it soon enough
But then I had that spirit
I could taste cadmium on my tongue
Knew the color of rain
oil in the rain
the madness of crows
startled from a corn field
caught in violent daubing gestures
or darker pebbles

But what if
Now

Maybe my crossroads is not in France
Maybe in Lodi somewhere
or right up the street.

I'll wait until just before midnight
stand under the streetlights
create a little picture
in the black heart of the intersection

and I'll see the shiny shoes first

He'll take my hand and drag it across the pavement
It will bleed out image
(just like Jimeny Cricket painting an entire swamp scene
in an S shaped swipe)

And on my little road
where I live
under the flashing lights
Wait. Stop. Go.

I would issue all the sunsets Van Gogh saw from his little cell
all the sunrises I've seen from mine
the locket of my heart would fall open
and spill pictures
of every moment of grace and pain
every plate laid before me
candles lit
touch, traveling
fields flying past
my fingers would burn
from this love

I would go with him then I guess
and not feel anything
but the movement of color
and the satisfaction
of a decent trade