Shedman's missing glove – a sestina for Ruth

Another challenge – this time a photo from daughter Ruth, so I thought I'd give a sestina a try. (Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina if you want to know more.)


Shedman's missing glove

I'm so confused I cannot hold new thinking
in my head for much more than a page, so all
my knowledge is partial, deliquescent in 
a compost heap of ingrained mental habit
and ideas collected from God knows where.
Most seemed a good idea at the time so 

I stuffed them in a mental drawer like gloves. So
now they're all mixed up, jumbling my thinking
with lots missing, important steps dropped somewhere.
When I try to communicate my thoughts, all
I transmit is the vagueness I inhabit,
a miasmic vapour deliquescent in

shimmering sweet nothings deliquescent in
goo. I envy those with firm opinions. So
logically solid is their mental habit,
their ideas feel like objects, their thinking
like express trains hurtling through the fog that's all
my own cogitation adds up to. Somewhere 

I lost a winning hand. I wish I knew where
I lost it. My brain cells deliquescent in
early onset Alzheimer's, or so it all
feels, aren't up for cerebation games so
the best I can manage with sloppy thinking
is write a poem, trying to inhabit 

this little shed of form. Out of the habit 
I may well be, but I'll have a crack, see where 
things lead, whether poetry improves thinking,
or makes it even more deliquescent in
the *Langolier erosion, creeping in so
insidiously to make blanks of us all.

At best a temporary shelter from all 
the shit, poetry's not the magic habit
found in **Lady Wilde of Sligo's story (so
handy to disappear like that!) It's where
sound and rhythm turn us deliquescent in
all the strange stuff that's the ground of our thinking.

All I need is a poetry shed somewhere
to breed the habit of deliquescence in
writing and so find that lost glove of thinking.



*Check out The Langoliers by Stephen King if you were wondering.


** Check out http://culturepotion.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/magical-clothing-in-folklore_18.html