The Reason I'm a Little Late
The Reason I’m a Little Late
I can't finish a poem if it's not finished with me. It isn’t the words I press on the page, it’s the way the words and the space press back and that pull, beyond lines, to let it all pour in, to feel life rub against me and scrape this skin away.
I feel a little silly using a picture of myself, but look! I’m holding a notebook and pencil! So it also felt silly to search Unsplash for pictures of people writing.
The Prompt
My composition book and the Notes app on my phone are both full of jumbled lines and images from the past week or so. I thought it would be easy peasey to pull a poem from these, but every poem I’ve started in the past week has stalled and gotten stuck—hence the lateness of this post. Sometimes that’s how it goes. I spent awhile working on a poem today, and I can feel that there’s somewhere it wants to take me still, but I don’t know where. So I’ll be patient—or try to be.
In response to all of that, the above poem poured out with virtually no effort and no passage of time. My muse apparently loves irony.
If you’d like a prompt to play with today, then I invite you to ponder your writing life now. Not the big arc of it. Not how it felt a year ago—right now, as in this moment or day or season. What are your longings? Your blocks? Your habits? Your inspirations? Your distractions? Your strengths? Your growth edges?
Where do you write? What does that space look, feel, smell, and sound like?
How does your writing influence or shape the rest of your life? How does the rest of your life influence or shape your writing?
If your writing were an animal, what animal would it be? If your writing were a landscape, what would it look like? If your writing were a celebrity talk show host, which one?
Does your writing have a message for you today, and if so, what is it? Is there anything you’d like to tell it back?
Run with whichever questions here feel helpful or generative to you, and absolutely feel free to ignore the rest. Follow your own muse over me—always. I’d love to read whatever you come up with!
They just toddle in
Like a grandchild with a book.
Keep your lap ready.
Here is a wayward poem!
Dancing Particles
^
My best poems often float
like dancing particles in the air,
light and soft and easy to lose,
as they wander through the ethereal
nature of space and time.
^
Born in movement,
wind and sand,
sweat and solidarity
with earth;
These inspired visions,
tantalizing bursts of creativity
do not linger long.
^
I know my masterpiece is in this sacred
screed and rubble, these mountains
of lines and phrases that sound so sweet
in my mind’s eye.
But they vanish into the sky,
elusive snippets of wisdom,
brilliant bubbles of profundity
blown away by the slightest trickle of
Wind.
^
I pray they land somewhere
where poets afar, or in another realm,
turn them into luscious gems.
Here I am left with the crumbs and ashes
of these broken lines,
monumental imaginings,
words to end all words.
^
Looking down, I scrape what I can
from the debris of poetic fragments,
scattered on the ground.
Piecing together what remains
Into something that looks like this.