For the last five or six days, something has been different in the world. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is, but I’m going to try. There are words spinning in my head again. Not ordinary prose, safe and banal in aspect, I have to admit, but poetry.
Some of it is single lines, which I scribble down, in the hope that I can find a place for them. but sometimes it’s stronger stuff – sonnets stripped down, good and bad. I’ve not felt the words seething in quite this manner in a long time, and yet I’m struggling to harness it.
It’s a little like being handed a mass of eels, and being told to harness them to Neptune’s chariot. Afterwards being told that Neptune’s changed his mind and he wants the seahorses as usual.
Poetry is dangerous stuff to write. It circumvents the front of the brain and taps into parts you don’t realise are there at the back. I’ve always found it gives me access to flashes of realisation about who and how I am, and sometimes even why. But in that moment of stringing the words together, in the act of making something different, I often feel more in touch with God than at any other time.
I don’t know where the words come from. I don’t know what they are going to be until I’m finished clicking them all together. The image that stays in my heart is that of a snowstorm. Words flurry around me, caught in the up and downdraughts of my mind, and they swirl in achingly beautiful gyroscopic movements, and I’m trying to grab them, to fix them down, so that everyone else can see the beauty that I can.
And it never works like that. Because the minute you glue the snow to the page, it melts, becoming something different. So I have to make allowances for the changes, to sound each word out carefully. But something is always lost once the words are tamed and put on the page. Like lions or tigers, they’re always prettier in their natural habitat.
Some of you will have seen this one. I wrote it on Friday, and keyed it into Facebook. But it’s one of the best I’ve done in a long time. It’s got a forward motion, a refrain, and it became something I never expected it to. Sometimes, when we face ourselves, all we can be is utterly helpless, and sometimes, being valued is just as terrifying as being worthless.
“You’re not my type,” I said when I first saw
You smile, and felt my heart drum out a beat,
When first I felt that unfamiliar heat
And checked the boiler for some unknown flaw.
“You’re not my type,” I said in disbelief,
As you brought brightness to my inner night,
As every word between us brimmed with light,
Each smile so gay in countering my grief.
“You’re not my type.” – Tears streaming down my face.
You treat me with respect and not mistrust.
You try to lift my head out of the dust,
And imbue in me some unaccustomed grace.
I’ve never seen the man you see in me,
But, by God, he is the man I’d like to be.