There is a downside to my claim that the poesy words just come. Often by the time I am done with a poem it is completely different from anything I thought I started to do. I have to give up all thought that I actually do this stuff. It is my unconscious weirder brother that does it. I guess I sort of get away from responsibility like that, up side. I am darker, more frivolous, weirder, cruder, and several other not necessarily savory things, down side. Sometimes I actually start out with an aim, say a seductive poem to a female friend because it is all harmless here but by the end of the poem I am nearly embarrassed because the poem is hardly seductive and borders on mean or something. The last example of this is quite recent but you will have to wait most of a year before you get to see the poem and by then I will not really remember where I originally placed it, in whose comments it appeared. That’s the good part of having over three hundred in the queue. Heh. That’s another responsibility distance…that I am posting the oldest poems first.
Suffice it to say, the poems speak for themselves. That is why I write these intros. At least then I get to say something…
Bested By Words
I often wonder
at my yearning to enter
this room filled with song
yet again after
the beating I took last time
when the words and lines
turned me from my hope
one more time, turned me into
knots they chose for me.
June 20, 2009 9:05 AM
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Oh boy, Christopher, do I get this!!! I had the phrase Listen Harder and I was going to write it out about the crow woman, and instead it presented itself with new voices and something I'd never examined consciously before. Yikes. How does that happen? I finished it and sat there breathing hard wondering who in the hell these people were in my head.
ReplyDeleteIt was to me, wasn't it? Cause that last line punched me off a wall and I thought...Christopher? It sounded so unlike you to be so biting or pessimistic. And if your preamble wasn't about the poem you wrote at my place - well, then I'll keep worrying about you. It's so hard.
AND how in the heck to you practice such patience with your poems? I'd be all pouncing over the poem of the day. Holy holy. I shake my head not understanding the nature of this kind of patience.
xo
have a beautiful day.
erin
Actually, sweetie, the poem I left at your place was not to you and was a true story about standing up and pissing in the night. I took off on your vision of your woman doing that if she were a man, a summertime activity. That poem is a memory, but as you say, "out of character" somehow. That may be because I was totally drunk in those days, pass out drunk before bed every eveniing in the early eighties. Pissing in the night like that for me is a drunken memory.
ReplyDeleteThe poem I left yesterday at your site is also not one that qualifies so much as an example of my "weirder other brother" because it is so historical. What you called out of character really isn't. It is simply true that if you persist in striding like a colossus (one sided and self centered) across your personal landscape over a period of time the trash you leave behind will make a statement in the end.
Or as Jim Croce sang once "you don't piss in the wind, don't mess around with the old Lone Ranger, and you don't mess around with Jim", thereby pointing out how complex standing out there pissing in the night can be for those who possess small man hoses (all our hoses are small in mid-winter by the way).
As far as "who in the hell are these people in my head?" Precisely. This is not original to you or me. Whitman also wrote "I contain multitudes." He wasn't kidding.
I am not sure what you mean by patience. I know what I would mean but it doesn't fit with "pouncing over the poem of the day". I think you see me differently from the way I look at myself, scratching my butt absent mindedly as I sit here.
LMAO - my unconscious weirder brother that does it....
ReplyDeleteHa! That I like him so much...does that make me wierd by association? Fine by me. My fingers have minds of their own and disassociate from my brain. Never do know what they'll say until all the click clack of keys has grown silent.
I was taught if the foo shits you have to wear it...
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you are weird by association but you might be weird by other means.
Novelists often complain that the characters they start with get a measure of autonomy going on not too far into the novel. Then writing a novel becomes a game of catch up with the characters. I think of my poems as some person speaking. It is not surprising that what that person had in mind to say might not be quite what I had in mind to say. Sometime soon I will be posting a poem entitled "I Contain Multitudes". Like Whitman, I won't be kidding.