G62 – Off the Page

I wander the margins’s head
call the graphite greyed
eraser crumbs gather
in a pile beside my desk,
though on my mind, written words
in secret
into the primeval swamp of
toothed consonants and big-lunged vowels
is where I’d rather be.

And into the fire, the margins
conspire against me:
‘hic sunt dracones’, a warning
of dangerous, unexplored areas, here
be dragons, beware the edges.

Off the page hurtled the word “off”.
The poem conferred upon the audience
like a secret map to the lost.

Off the page is where she had her chance,
but could not resist;
is where he liked to stay, unread, lived.
Pirandello’s Rosetta, until she drowned
like a stone in Virginia Woolf’s pocket,
was a different woman.

You could recite the words out loud,
over and over again until they absorb
and you become one with them.

He was Hyde,
the squire and the stable boy,
done with the lot of them
before they start getting ideas.

Or else,
program for misbehaviour:
the student forfeited
for being messenger, secretary,
the letters suffocate into the Universal Mind.

Off the page, braille bumps tumble,
a shining disarray of blinking flavours
of delight and disgust.
Are we on the same page?

Liberate the poem.
All is open to interpretation
and into madness fallen
into the pool.


Bryne Helen Lewis, Pearl Pirie, Catherine Heard, Priscilla Brett, Brian Bartlett, Kristen Peterson, James Depew, Robin Moses, Warren Dean Fulton, Rob Budde, Nick Treanor, Jamie Reid, Amanda Earl, Kim Goldberg, Slim Volumes, Andrew Topel, David Fujino, Kathleen Betts, Priscilla Brett, Kateri Lanthier