Snowflakes In April

The story begins near the end
And I try to sort out the pieces
Try to figure out the crossword puzzle
Yet words criss cross over too many places
Characters act out of character
Storylines begin to lose their lines
Forevers feel like foreshadowing
Yet the day is forever bright forever blue
Crossed over into multiple intersections
I try to make sense and try to see how to end it
Yet it never really began in the first place
The hero never began his quest
The journey never really began
So how to structure a house without a foundation
So how to fortify a kingdom without a king
So how what do you do with a half-told story five hundred
thousand words long
So how do you begin to edit when you simply want to keep
adding?
How do you start weeding a field so full of beautiful
wildflowers?
This thing chose me I never chose it
To be a storyteller and to see with these eyes
To meet characters at bridges and try to build something
with them
To feel where others don’t even begin to start feeling
Another manuscript unfinished and put on the shelf
With some great sentences and wonderful scenes
With some heartfelt stories
But too messy with no audience to share it with
The whole if-only-one-reader-could-be-moved
mantra no longer applies
Even if it did for a while
I try to put exclamation points on places that don’t need
punctuation
I try to condense and cut
Ultimately I will encase the story and cart it away
Like a coffin that only needs one hand to hold it
These brilliant roads and the places they can take you
Sometimes they bring simple, midnight sighs
That know the morning won’t have anymore words left for it
That know there were already too many words to begin with
And like snowflakes in April
The words melt too fast

And leave no mark where they fell