They begin as scribbled notes in the margins of a notebook. Some make it. Some don’t. This one’s for all those ideas that never saw the light.  

‘Tis unfinished poetry,
That finds me on the fence, 
‘Twixt razing or engaging 
My marginal brilliance — 
 
There’s the robin fallen from its nest, 
Harried in homespun twine … 
And gray December twenty-sixth, 
When all the world’s reclined … 
 
There’s the hand-in-hand walk, 
To that little red school … 
And the lone cryptic phrase, 
Scratched on every spool … 
 
There’s the soft thund’rous din, 
Of a breaker’s ebbless rumble … 
(And countless other germs, 
From whence my pen doth stumbled.) 
 
‘Tis unfinished poetry, 
That keeps my mind askew; 
Like a many-splintered love, 
That sends my heart a-stew.