Tag Sale

I had to do something: they were tumbling out in bundles
everywhere, falling out like tufts of hair from some poor
psoriatic head: I've tried to clean them up - I've organized
them into piles by size, sometimes by color, occasionally by
smell (I had to air a villanelle out on the fire escape):
and now I wait: they're sale-tagged - all negotiable of course.
 
Why can't I let them go for free? It seems dishonorable not
at least to grant them transient dignity - affix to each a value,
charge a fee, however slight. Mother, father, brother poems -
steeped in psychic color, light: sepia phantoms: weeping willows:
all gone now - transformed entirely by fingers on a keyboard
(mine): rising, falling to whatever dip and climb that I decide:
 
subjected to my meter and my rhyme. High time that they
be taken out, sold off - these muffled chants and shouts
from all this musky past. Fate decrees that they must go
and I must last. So help yourself to my repast of poems: drop
a salutary coin into the bucket: take whatever strikes you as
a necessary page. I've worked for it - and I deserve a wage.