What Poems Are by Joan Colby

Poems 

score the morning like birdsong,
like maples embellished with a scripture
of love letters, rivers seething
with stifled expression like adolescents
trapped in a classroom. As if trigonometry
could solve the sore equations of the heart.

As if pure words distilled in loss
could quench the thirst for variety.
Change-making clatter in the drawer
of dividends. Someone scribbles,
Someone declaims. 

The ancient poet thumbs the book
He wrote so many years ago. His
Talent then screamed like macaws
In bamboo cages. Now he claims
poems are dull, they
Make you sleep.