by Stuart Barnes
Sir Blindness gropes through the House
of Bluebird, insisting ‘I am perfectly nice!’
Wanting an urn for the oak leaf’s smoke,
or a follower to polish mirrors,
Blindness is all smiles.
Spurned, he tweets like a child,
his threads unravel wilder, wilder:
‘The centre of my sinful earth, poor soul.’
To generate tenderness Blindness says
‘On the writing hand I have fluid,
only money is a poultice.’
Still poor, still poor, Blindness’s kindness
splinters into a million pieces,
a million butterflies
bristling with milkweed. The boy must be anesthetized—
poison in a glass of tea,
pasteurization with steam.
Blindness is the aphid of poetry,
shadiness the root of it.
They will not bloom, the Chinese roses.
note: ‘Blindness’ is a terminal from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Kindness’ and includes a line from Shakespeare