I am blue (02)

Wordy accuse the commonest songbird
you who adorned your filler notebooks
with weaponry scattering the figures
of the Wehrmacht or the pithier Cong.

And blots were a failure in transmission
soaked in multiple sheets of filler paper,
either bombs or targets, beneath them
words cancelled. When they didn’t come

there was tic-tac-toe, no square left empty
in which two nothings, exes or zeros, recurred,
two options to nothing, one to which a number
could be added, one to which it couldn’t be.

Time permitting, you blotted grids out
and there you go again, staining paper
with multiple choices, your fingers
pressed down so hard as your attention

to what was sketched or spoken lapsed
the paper broke, or bruises of ink
passed their imprint to the paper
as a father passes misery to his child.

So to a lack of figuration you were driven,
the dream of the true abstractionists
who permitted in their manifestos
total immersions of baritone blue

until airplanes vanished with rocketry
and tic-tac-toe with rote vocabulary
and boxes rounded into azure ovals,
perfect holes that didn’t represent.