I like you a twenty-year old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.

His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still naps in rose wood.

Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneer a gullible tongue.

They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove it
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. Laminate angels.
Dust up to the heavens.