Sometimes, the words

Sometimes, the words don’t come.

Sometimes, the words seem frozen behind an impermeable layer of uncertainty and hesitation.  You can see them staring out at you, waiting for you to step forward to claim them, to write them out, to give voice to them.  You feel them at the back of your mind where you have placed them, hoping to be freed from their persistent calling.  You hear them whispering to you in your waking dreams and you shove them away from you in favour of easier pursuits.  You move further into the morass of your own making, where movement occurs in slow motion and limbo is your reality.  You deny, deny, deny.

Sometimes, the words flow out of you like honeyed poetry, dripping down and off the page in a glorious sweet mess, golden and sticky with inspiration.  You roll around in the joy of the words and emerge sated and stuffed full of sugared goodness.  You come back to the words again and again, drawn to their nectar and feverish in your need for more.

Sometimes, the words are not enough for you to be able to overcome the fear that clutches at your heart.

Sometimes, the words are your only and greatest salvation.

Sometimes, the words fail you and you are left blank and grasping, gasping for meaning.

Sometimes, the words are your everything and you are simply their holy vessel.

Sometimes, the words.

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Sunday reflections #72

But listen to me. For one moment
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you.

Rumi

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Interlaced

He reached over and interlaced his fingers through mine, and my world broke open.

Irrevocably, irretrievably.

Helplessly.

Lovingly.

And nothing was ever the same.

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Sunday reflections #71

My friends are my ‘estate’.  Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.

Emily Dickinson
Letter to Samuel Bowles, August 1858 or 1859

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Sunday reflections #67

here’s to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here’s to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning’s beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever’s afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here’s to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

here’s to opening and upward,to leaf and to sap
e.e. cummings

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Sunday reflections #56

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world?  It is not far from it.  No urban night is like the night there … Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether.  Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Ezra Pound

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Haiku hell?

This morning I am
over at the Baraza,
lost my mind, you see

I’ve been writing silly
haiku, cannot stop myself,
it’s an addiction.

Seriously, jump
over there, I’m going for help,
need a haiku shrink.

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Sunday reflections #35

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It’s always our self we find in the sea.

Excerpt from “maggie and milly and molly and may”
e.e. cummings

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Sunday reflections #33

With no companion to my mood,
Against the wind as it should be,
I walk, but in my solitude
Bow to the wind that buffets me.

The Wind
Vikram Seth

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Sunday reflections #25

be of love (a little) more careful
than of everything
guard her perhaps only
A trifle less (merely beyond how very)
closely than nothing
remember love by frequent
anguish (imagine
her least never with most
memory)
give entirely each
forever its freedom

(dare until a flower,
understanding ceaselessly sunlight
open what thousandth why and
discover laughing)

e. e. cummings, be of love (a little)

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