Melissa Lyle

Ars Poetica: Consummation

A lone vocation is the writer’s call,
which bids him keep apart amid the crowd
that frolics, foams, and jostles over all
this brisking life, and roars increasing loud
through karaoke bars and traffic rage
and piercing conversations on a cell.
Absorbing words and sounds of nightclub stage,
or making notes on lovers’ kiss-and-tell,
he sits and tries to fashion and distill
his thoughts and feelings on a pixeled face
in solo, keyboard-driven overspill.
Aloneness in this way is an embrace,
the nearest twining hand and heart might find
in quiet consummation with the mind.