when the abstract abstracts memory

When the abstract seems like landscape you’ve pictured before

is when you think you see

everything

until the landscape swallows you whole and spits you out

a babe in the woods

naked and alone and into the trees that look

like Jackson Pollack’s handkerchief before he sneezed

and you’re left wondering

where you believe and what you believed

and life’s too short to see where your sight begins and where it

leaved

and what you see

you once seed

even if the word is saw

that sees through the cutting of these trees

so what you saw was seed

planted deep in memory

harvesting these thick vapor steams and paper ream dreams

until ink bleeds

to read as poetry

or reality

or bullshit

only to fertilize

these next crop of printed dreams.