On Sonnets

They say that sonnets are the highest art,

a form that truly plumbs the human soul;

the lion’s roar or birdsong in our heart

in fourteen lines is somehow captured whole

and yet, for me, there’s much I do not say,

those hidden truths I find I can’t reveal.

I think we poets wake up every day

with no way of expressing how we feel.

The passions and the furies of the deep,

despair that feeds itself upon our fear,

the memories that shimmer in our sleep

but will not, upon waking, reappear.

And here, again, I face the fourteenth line.

I hate myself and write that I am fine.