A few used-to-be regular readers
have begun to ask,
“Ann, where are your poems?”
I’m bewildered myself.
Poems used to grab me,
push-shove-drag me
to the nearest tablet,
keep me pinned down
in an iron-glove grip
until I wrote them down
and the poems got to say
exactly what
they wanted to say
in exactly the way
they wanted to say it.
And everybody was happy.
But none of that
is happening of late.
I am writing.
In my dream journal:
dreams,
their interpretations
and explorations,
dialogues with dream-figures,
dream-tigers and dream-healers,
active imagination, imagining.
I’m also writing tiny:
condensing formative life stories
into mighty little paragraphs,
just 3 by 4 inches
making up the miniature books
that accompany
the Medicine Cabinet art
I create for my clients.
But where are my poems?
If I think about them,
I can actually see them,
lined up,
waiting for me…
Leaning heavily
against my stone wall,
a disparate bunch,
reeking of something
possibly holy,
doom-scrolling their phones,
biting their cuticles,
staring off blankly,
thinking about ducking out
for a smoke, maybe a sandwich,
wondering what to do
with the dregs
in their Starbucks cups,
backs of their heads
smacking the wall
from time to time
as they wake
from nano-napping…
until eventually
they are all just
so
entirely
bored,
so put out
with being put off
they wander off
to wherever it is
disgruntled poems go.
Except for one.
Just one waited long enough.
The one about why
I’m not writing poems.
Ann Keiffer
December, 2025
(Thank you for asking about the poems!)
Image: Digital edit by Ann Keiffer from Pinterest
