Every Awful Idea

When inspiration vacationed
as it sometimes must

to avoid shearing or rust
I instead reread

every awful idea
lingering in Drafts.

Some were less bleak
than saving them first seemed,

than toil and ire might infer.
They reminded that art

prefers a process
adding up to twenty pages of

handwritten notes and self-debate
to a flowery prestidigitation,

that magic is another math 
practiced for hours, for powers

unresolved as my understanding of
the starlings watching without reaction
while reporting back to God.