07 March 2007

time enough for words

I’ve had this poem in my brain since early Thursday; I’ve been working it and reworking it, and I finally got a sketch of it down in class last night. It’s been coming to me for days in the form of images—ephemeral photographs in my mind to which I’m struggling to ascribe language and words. It’s about 20 lines or so, folded in my pocket, being carried around in the anticipation of something to click in my brain and make it fit. It’d be a good poem…if someone else would write it. Or if I could make the images in my mind and my vocabulary connect.
Today was the day I would let it rest. Today was the day I would think about everything but that unrhymed demon nesting in my pocket, folded into notebook paper, just waiting to be constructed into something other than the half-formed mess it is right now. So in letting it rest, a completely different poem wrote itself out on my computer screen. I woke up with this new poem coated on my teeth, spoke this new poem to my dash on the drive to work, wrote out this new poem in about an hour at my desk.
I’m jealous of the ease at which this new poem unfurled; frustrated that it should have been more difficult to be justified.
Damn writing.

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