During the day my brain is
a dry well
like the one in our field
spitting out muddy water,
running dry before
you can fill a few
paragraphs.
At night the words come
beating against the back of my eyes
scratching open my eyelids
twitching the tips of my fingers.
They chant:
Find us a pen
Let us out, set us free.
We don’t dance in the daylight.
The weight of the day
drags us down.
You’ll forget us by morning;
this moment will pass.
So I slip from the arms of my lover
slide from warmth to cool night air.
I surrender my spot
to a competing cuddled pillow.
I sit under brillant stars
in the moonlit armchair
and spill out the words
fresh, shining, and clear
as moths batter my monitor
the only light in the room.
Maybe we should
dig that damn well
under the moonlight.
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[…] wine, build a concrete retainer wall, make endless car repairs, make flour from yucca, and dig a well, to name a […]
Beautiful, and very fitting imagery. I gotta ask tho, what made you decide to write the poem as one huge stanza instead of many smaller ones? Was it a stylistic choice made to show how your thoughts run in one big continuum during the night or something of the like? Either way excellent work, and I hope you reclaim your spot – your throne! – from that darn pillow!
Thanks!
Actually it wasn´t a conscious decision, other than it “felt right” all as one. I tend towards longer stanzas; my longer poems may have just 5-6 stanzas total. I also come to poetry through spoken word, so I tend to think of stanza breaks as “hard stops’ in the flow of a speech. In this case the one place that I think it merits a stop would be at “I sit”, but then the whole thing seemed imbalanced with just two stanzas, one very long and one very short. So I left it all together. I like your interpretation of my intentions better! 😉