Filling Blank Pages

On the way to work today, the bus was so slow, I called to tell them I'd be late. "Oh, no, you're not scheduled for another hour," was the reply.  By then I was three minutes from downtown, from a busy rainsoaked street full of shops and businessmen and tourists.  

I scampered off to Starbucks - it's close and has cushy chairs.  I sat down in the very cushiest, leather and air shifting at the weight of me, and took out my poetry notebook. It's been neglected, rather, though that's not entirely an accurate representation of how I treat poetry.  "Neglect" implies some sort of discipline, some sort of regular attack.  Instead, what poetry I write is intermittent and usually the result of a certain kind of down time.  I have a kaleidoscopic relationship to my own poetry (it's painful even to write the word, it feels exactly like last night when I ripped my own skin off near the cuticle of my index finger just because I'd been biting my thumbnail all night and it was sharp - unexpected damage coming from your own hands).  Kaleidoscopic in the sense that how I feel about it shifts every moment, depending on what kind of light is thrown across the page and how I'm turning.

There are days I read through this book and feel, if not wildly talented with words, a certain satisfaction in the stories my words have built.  Not that I think they are good, but that I find myself enjoying them.  The trap here is always that it seems like an easy leap to assume others would enjoy them, but there's no proof to that theory.

Anyway, when I allow and/or force myself to write poetry I use my fountain pen, and it's probably not an accident that today I had a lot of trouble getting it to write.  First it was out of ink, then it just wouldn't behave - I have to lick it to get it started, which feels like some sort of Victorian affectation.  Then it only wrote gunk for a while, things I had to scratch out so that when I double back and read them, I don't mistake them for anything I actually meant at the time.  

I intended to type one out here, but they don't hold up to that kind of scrutiny.  Perhaps I'll go get drunk at an open mic night someday, and spill them out into the air like smoke rings.