That Thing You Do

That thing you do

written by: Michael Shea

@calmsbehaviour

 

I get to talking to those who also write poetry and they’re like
“Hey man I wrote this piece over a week or so and I’d like to know what you think”,
and I wonder what it is that I do that’s different to them?
I mean I write poetry too but it’s not like I plan it or think about my piece,
I just start when I feel the vibe and let it out. It’s like it’s not even mine.
Where do these words come from I say to myself and yet here I am thinking about a piece,
which in turn is about the pieces of me that I don’t think about, and trying to fathom
What they mean.
Poetry to me is like a conversation with the moment, as it happens in a free form flow that
emanates from a place within me or without. A place without time, now and then or so it would
seem.
Here I go again letting go, I think I thought this out and yet the words begin to pop from places I don’t plan and link in ways beyond design.
This is like communicating with you in a way that I can extemporise in a manner you may hear without judgement, akin to having a puppet on my hand. “Oh they say it’s just a poem”
I say what you say isn’t so, it’s not that way, at least not the way I meant, no not so grand. “He did it again” I hear you groan.
I look back at my works which I must say I never to this day have learnt to quote and think how did that happen?
To me poetry is rhythm and rhyme in tempo set to a time that canters and gallops symbolically sublime. It produces such images that conjure up fragrance of a wispy lost memory trapped forever in your mind, there for all time.
The verbose usage of soliloquy with the thoughts that I speak that seem to fall off of me are capped by the act of thinking.
Were I to concentrate hard on the words and their meanings, to tie them together seems contrived which to me is deceiving; unless I’m drinking.
Lyrical limericks of strings attached to weblike contrails in my mind dissipate with regularity, I know you think I planned this but this stuff just falls out with razor-sharp clarity.
Is that a poem? Is the ability to inanely demonstrate a unique innate trait to make words rhyme with consistency that makes many irate? That wasn’t intended but happened again and unless I consciously correct it, where will it end? Yes you guessed it, I know not when, it happened yet again.
I guess I’m trying to say that for me a poem speaks about the trivialities of life, “no” you say “poetry must be about the big issues of love and pain” and yet are not the simple things in life what consumes us all?
Is not the gentle convolutions on a dew covered petal, which once viewed captures your mind if only a moment the quintessential moment of it all?
Is not the wonder of a bird in flight, so fast and yet so swiftly perfect in its directness an arrow to your heart, no matter how cold or hard a voice within you speaks the truth.
I wrote the title of this piece before I started thinking it was about me, and how it is that I create my works, and yet here we are questioning how it is the little things. That thing you do.