On Thursday, during our one-on-one meeting, I asked my poetry professor what one thing I could do to improve my writing. She told me to free-write poetry every day. In her opinion, which I agree with, my biggest weakness is that I think too much when I am writing instead of freeing my mind to go where it wishes and just being the vehicle through which it flows. After looking through my notebook and realizing how often I cross things out and self-edit, Professor suggested I do all my free-writing on the computer so that I do not have the option of crossing out. She told me it is her belief that if I do that I will find at least two or three usable lines a day.
Today I took her advice and this was the result:
Morning tonight feels like waking up to broken glass of shattered window panes. French doors open to English men wearing tweed coats and smoking ciggies. Signs of forced entry lay shimmering in the grass all rainbowy with dew. Was it you coming to steal me away in the night? If you asked I might have gone. Gone from the relative safety of my existence to the windiness of yours. Possibility appeals to me in fleeting moments of temporary sanity. Brokenness is old hat, but there’s got to be something behind that. Walk through it and reach for the light of the lamppost glowing like the moon and stitch me up, lift me up, talk me out of it and in to you. Sleepless sounds of strength emerging as we’re converging verging on reckless. You open a book and fill up with wonder and tear it asunder. Under the words lies the truth. Eat up the inky stains and spit out the blank page to write it all anew. Few resist the urge to abandon truth for greatness. Greed is not in your verbiage. Invisible fingerprints dust the sills of broken windows seeking solace. Tonight morning is found on distant shores where we might have been and might be going, racing time, holding on to moments slipping along the seams of the globe out witting the light of lesser gods. Stars stretch languidly across your face as you become one, a celestial body among celestial bodies. Bodies are piling up, but souls are floating free suspended between truth and humanity. Flight is folly and you fancy me a fool, a high compliment from you. I lay above you and sink below wallowing in weightless wonderment over it and under it singing soundlessly watching the airwaves ripple into dawn. Over breakfast all appears unmatched apples and pears. Swiftly moving songbirds are singing outside and I let them in to feast on leftover bits of peanut butter toast. Out in the barn I sew with a needle in a haystack.
I think there might be a tiny nugget of truth in all this "free your mind" business...
I like this about the windy existence
ReplyDelete"Gone from the relative safety of my existence to the windiness of yours"- good line- interesting imagery and contrast between the two existences but wind stops and calms and roars and rattles and there are differen types of wind...
This is good too "You open a book and fill up with wonder and tear it asunder" and the lines that follow about starting anew.
Freeing the mind can be really hard to do sometimes. Its hard to just let it go to free write. Its hard NOT to censor yourself. I think there IS value to it but then you have to go back through what ever the mind spits out and find the good lines