calling on the muse

my muse cries pearls. she giggles with the moon about lovers she's never had. she grooms her owl wings with a silver brush and her long grey hair with a golden comb. she dances in swamps, putting anyone who sees her in a trance. she covers the blood on her hands with black gloves. she leaves rotting flowers in her hair, puts bangles of gold, silver, and bronze on her wrist. her voice is somewhere between aphrodite in a canyon and a trucker smoking her fifth cigarette. she winks at strangers in bars by the ocean. she trades stories with vampires and witches. she's clunk to a piano across the ocean and played hide and go seek on saturn.

my muse, i must've found her somewhere, but i find it hard to believe she wasn't always with me. that she wasn't in the forests, the birds all calling her name. that she wasn't in the chlorine of the local pool. that her eyes didn't watch from the mountains of blue and from the stained glass in the chapel.

i call for her, every day, every morn, every night. my pen and my mind make their way through the woods, the ground covered in mushrooms and the trees dressed in moss. every day, a little closer, to whatever golden cottage or hippy van she inhabits. muse, oh muse, help me turn it into gold.