Notions (Poetry)

My skull’s been hatching out the eggs of old ideas —
dark shells are cracking wide — strange offspring sit
born ugly in their wrinkled skins — unnameable —
I can’t remember where these orphans fit

in my imagination — what blind passion sent
me madly into some creative mode
then abruptly petered out after conception
quite unaware of random thinking’s code.

There followed nights of ignorant gestation
and now the muse has blessed me hundredfold
with the weirdest clutch of misbegotten inklings
I’m half inclined to toss out in the cold.

I would try to raise them all but it’s not easy
to mother idle fancies — educate
them in the finer arts — lined up and vaguely tidy
like normal poems with ambitions — sitting straight.

But they are freaks — throwbacks that I don’t recognise —
unruly figments fathered in some dream —
these notions are best sent back where they came from —
reabsorbed — dissolved without a scream.