Write or die

(A Poem)

Revolution in my hands,
I shake them, fanned out,
a mime on this Zoom call, and undermined.

I have laid out my poem like lines of code,
hoping to kill this entry,
poison procured from my pet python, Jebediah.
I have strung conditionals in infinite_loops.

If the sun rises:
write, fork, code, eat, repeat.
Else:
sleep,
wait for Winter to pass,
the last fluttering leaf on a birch,
like a weave
alighting from a bald lady’s head.

But I can’t wait in bed
all season for Winter to die.
I like big data, and I cannot lie;
lines of sonnets, couplets, elegies and haikus too.

I must write,
lest or die;
code to get high.
So I sigh into my webcam:
can you hear me?
I’ve taken up arms against death.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash