Time To Play

It is a pristine page, clean on the blue screen
where I compose, I don’t expect it to stay that
way as words glow from blunt, abused fingers,
as sounds insistent in my head translate into
sentence structures, as lips articulate rhythms
of jumbled lexis as swiftly as I unravel them.
I couldn’t know what might emerge tonight,
I only knew the gripping tightness in my mind
and an indecent pressure to express and let
the dammed words flow.

It’s not always this way, there are times when
I know within a line or two what I must write,
when some event has incited raw passion or
wrenched me from my feet or I have staggered
unbalanced from fright or fear, despairing the
sheer effrontery, beaten, contrite. Not tonight.
Tonight I am free to roam the growing fields
and taste whatever delights are imagined, to
follow the whim of the wind and random flights
of thistledown inviting my errant delinquency –
to go with the flow.

If I had known poetry could do this for me I’d
have surrendered a long time ago, grown fat on
the back of my muse with hair sleek and long
to the waist, worn kaftans with no shoes, spoke
harmony. As it goes I have time to play without
haste the games that engage me most, write
when the urge makes havoc with good intent,
dispense with guilt-management and stress,
lend commonsense enough rope to tether
itself beyond hope of poetic redress.
© 23 August 2006, I.D. Carswell