on the process of the thing

Here's how it works for me. First I have to fall in love with one line. Just a few words, just enough for me to sink down into. This line will come from God-knows-where when I am least expecting it. Maybe when I'm driving in my car and blasting that new Eminem song I'm ashamed to admit I like, or maybe when I'm foaming milk for an extra dry cappuccino, or maybe when I'm in a hurry to leave the house and have no time for an inconvenient little poem. But it will come, and then I'm stuck with it.

So then I have the line. The rest of the day is spent in it's company. I play it again and again and again in my mind like a record until I know it inside and out. I hold it up to myself like a dress and wonder what types of accessories go along with it. I hum it inside my brain like repeating a mantra. I imagine it swimming free in the ocean at sunset. I imagine it stuck in the house all day. I let it eat dinner with me. I take it for a walk around old town. I let it wear me like a costume so I can see the world from it's eyes.

Next come the late hours of night (or, more accurately, the wee hours of the morning). Being a borderline insomniac means that the best time to sort through love affairs is when the rest of the world is snuggled in bed and my mind is still up and buzzing with light. This part, where the poem actually forms, is traditionally romantic. If that one line is my soul mate, the verses and the format and the rhyme scheme and the beat are like the wedding day and the honeymoon and the house and the kids. When you love someone, it's the someone who matters, and everything else is just part of a sweet-package deal. It's the same with a poem. It's really that one line that holds the magic spark....all the details fall in place around it. It's kind of like building a home, really.

...and there you have it. That's how I write my poems. Funny- seems that I will either faithfully adore a poem forever, or dramatically scorn the day I ever met it and pretend we never had a fling; and I'll admit, it always seems rather unpredictable as to which route I'll adopt on any given day.

Below you'll find a short creation from the early hours of this morning. I wonder...can you find the line that pursued me all day?

Under covers of dim yellow and after
several minutes on the porch, I realized
that I was holding my breath

but letting it go hurt.
It's easy to imagine the pink-ness of my
lungs stretching fingers, aching for you

back in my life, you to make it easier
to live again in places
with microwaves and fast internet.

sun drips down with the rain
from the ferns as I feel myself
leaking out love. small puddles.

all night I watched the dark ceiling -
your eyes and their deep blackness
and because you are too young

and they should be shining.