Twist

This may be ridiculously ambitious for someone trying to find their way back into poetry after a long, long hiatus, but I wanted to see if I could do something challenging.  I wanted to see if I could break away from my songwriting voice that always wants to write couplets.  So I found my little college textbook The Book of Forms by Lewis Turco and thumbed through it until this form took my fancy.  It's a glose, a Spanish/Portuguese form that requires four opening lines that are later repeated.  Only lines six and nine of the four ten-line stanzas must rhyme; the rest is up to the poet.  It was fun to write and re-write, getting tangled up in my own mistakes and discoveries, but it seems stiff and too obscure.  It doesn't have the heat of poetry yet; maybe you can help me figure out why not.

Twist          

For unexplained mystery lingering on                     

My music was struggle and fight                            

By the soul of water I was consumed                    

In my invisible dreams of liquid sound         

The page descends upon this line of code              

Hidden inside the need for sleep                            

A single letter of the sequence wrong                     

Thirty years later the code unleashed                     

A nighttime line by morning gone                           

Still twists me as the code explodes                       

A single grade held by heart too deep                    

Pushed me from poetry into song                          

With existential longing I took that road                 

For unexplained mystery lingering on                     

To indulge the morning with poetry                       

For he who knows rhythm can versify                   

But where to learn accent, splitting light                 

Prismatic beat for eyes and ears to verify?             

I was rhythm at work by day and night                  

Turning dust and cattle into sovereignty                 

But the bard counts rhythm into surprise                

Turns energy into that which feels right                  

Though my pulse was rising from poverty             

My music was struggle and fight                            

The arcing waves of life episode                            

Would plant my face on a sandy beach                  

So twist my life until it blooms                              

Organic hope of learning to teach                          

From language by rules in college rooms               

Always looking back at the hidden code                

Finding a voice for classroom speech                    

Weaving it all on watery looms                              

Look a little deeper I must I know                         

By the soul of water I was consumed                    

I'm learning to grow like any other tree                  

As you pull my ears with your fingertips                

Love and language, water and sound                     

Till an icy moment from my heart I rip         

And it spins my brain in circles round                    

But I give it due for changing me                           

Now where else to go but to your lips?                  

I have flowers in ice where crystals abound            

But only till it all becomes poetry                           

In my invisible dreams of liquid sound