Visionaries’ Mumbo-Jumbo

It hurts to be human,
and there’s no vaccine to inoculate
movie stars or masters
from their awakened tribes,
visionaries shoving their way
through the turnstile that’s always guarded by
words that form the saddest stories,
— bespeckled koi and bejeweled stones —
when weekend poems are written by the teller of tall tales
who is short on sleep like so much mumbo-jumbo
in the kitchen jambalaya.