The aborted poems
I deserted inside my Underwood typewriter
crawl underneath hammerhead letters.
They never left the metal womb of their creation.
As Samuel suckles milk
only Susan can provide,
the letters to the elegy I type
strike the heads of every poetic deformity.
One lacks a leg, another survives
with a one-chambered heart.
Under this attack, all the fetuses
of my aborted poems
escape between the spaces
in my QWERTY alphabet:
a free-verse searches for a stanza
by latching onto Susan’s
breastfeeding body
while the sestina
devoted to a childhood assault
finds me with my open journal
and a black flow pen
where arms of flawed design
penetrate my open water eyes.