cover’d up in leaves

Sometimes I think about
All the poetry I haven’t written.
Crammed into notes apps,
The backs of my hands and my notebooks;
And everything that slips through my fingers,
Water, sand.

Sometimes I mourn them—
All those dead things,
Not quite in my head and not quite out of it,
All those words that choke and die and fade into nothing
Long before they come into being.

And I’m thinking about you tonight,
Half-poems, I’m thinking of you.
All the dreams I dream, 
Of violet seas and yellow skies,
Of crimson rainstorms and deep blue thunder;
You are all the dreams I dream and still remember,
But more than that,
You are all the dreams I forget.
The darkness that fades in the quiet morning light,
The something-in-the-dark that isn't there anymore⁠—
You are all the dreams I dream
And wake to find gone.

I’m thinking about you.

(Art: The Violet Wave, 1895-96, by Georges Lacombe)

This one is sort of half a poem from 2019, resurrected and refined to fullness, rid of (most of) its past edginess. There was a bit more originally, something about the moon and secrets and morning light, but I wasn't having any of that.

The title is Keats: it's from Ode to a Nightingale, "fast fading violets, cover'd up in leaves". Because that's pretty much what most of these half-poems are , I think, like fast fading violets.