I Best Remember Just the Mud

I Best Remember Just the Mud

    "All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
        "Anne Sexton"

Must I die then
victim to the crush of failure
the crumbling shards
of fallen words and fated rhyme?

Is it all a lie
some strange function of time
a staccato of pause and flow
destined to crack and fail?

Were my shattered images
only the crash of phrases
in random, splintered thoughts
that left me beyond reproach?

Or dare I hope for more
a moist clay precisely thrown
from soil spun on metaphor?
No, I best remember just the mud

that murky, silent ooze of me
where my search for solace
is nothing more than fractured
lines on a weathered vase.