My muses have amusing ways
of teasing me on silent days
by giving me no words to write
until I try to sleep at night
then hide the notepad I keep near
and dry my pen so that no tear
of ink will cry upon the page,
thus leaving me a nightmare’s rage
which twists my dreams in nasty knots
of dreadful and outrageous plots,
too strange to write and too obscure
to last till dawn—they won’t endure
the hapless, napless hours tossed
until I wake, when all are lost.
Ken Gosse prefers writing short, rhymed verse with traditional meter and generally full of humor. First published in The First Literary Review–East in November 2016, since then in Pure Slush, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and others. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years, usually rescue cats and dogs underfoot.