Poets for Human Rights Selection, also published in The Sailor Review and Crossroad Poetry Anthology.
You can’t escape
the poem that wakes you at night
crying “write me.”
If you switch on the light
and record the words,
you may discard it later as drivel,
or you may extract a precious kernel
as if cracking a raw walnut
to find a morsel shaped like your brain
that tastes so sweet, so carefully spiced,
you dream about it for years.
If you don’t write it down,
if you shrug your shoulders
& drift back to sleep,
the poem disappears
like a lone dog bark on a distant block,
and you forgo,
perhaps forever,
the treasure of night poems
strung together over time
into a necklace of truth.