Time To Play (rev)

 

It is a pristine page, clean on the blue screen
where I compose; I don’t expect it to stay that
way and words glow from blunt abused fingers
sounds insist in my head, translate into sentence
structures as lips articulate rhythms of a jumbled
lexis as swiftly as I can unleash it.

I couldn’t know what might emerge tonight,
I only knew gripping tightness in my mind and
pressure, the indecent urge to express and
let dammed words flow.

It isn’t always this way, there are times when I
know within a line or two what I must write, like
when some event has incited raw passion or
wrenched me from my feet or I have staggered
unbalanced from fright or fear, despairing its
sheer effrontery, beaten and contrite.

But not tonight. Tonight I am free to roam in the
growing fields and taste whatever delights are
imagined, to follow the whim of the wind and
the 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 promised muse with hair sleek
and long to the waist, wearing kaftans with no
shoes, speaking in tones.

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 my own
commonsense enough rope to tether itself
beyond hope of poetic redress.
© I.D. Carswell