April

In April everything is new. The sun is shaking out her summer sundresses, the wind has opened up the windows, and the earth is cleaning house. Little bits of life are literally popping out of the ground. It’s a time of fresh clean pages and a brand new start.

Spring cleaning is not a pretty process; a job for overalls and rain boots. I pull out old poems with dusty descriptions and moldy metaphors. I sort through piles of prose and folders of free form junk, keeping an eye out for inspiration. An heirloom idea, just one little light bulb I can plant and grow into a spring flower – something bold and beautiful with the fresh, crisp smell of spring. Something worthy of April.

After I’ve waded through words and words and found my lifeline, I trim away the dead parts. Then I plant that seed on a blank page and I begin.

If free falling is downward movement under the force of gravity only, then free writing is the virtual movement through the gravity of my thoughts. But in order to do either you have to let go and trust that a homemade hug on the wind will catch you. And in this case, carry me safely home to the whooping and whispering of satisfied souls.

I have to admit it’s been a while since I’ve done this. I’ve missed it.

I missed the way the way my hand would flow across the page in a practiced way. As if my hand and the pen and the paper were inseparable friends with so many things to say. Friends who, after a few beers, are closer than close. It’s hard to get them to say goodbye and head to bed.

I missed the way alliteration tastes. The way a cliché wins a chuckle, or a click of the tongue. I missed the way words, when married to an image can paint a picture, or capture a feeling you didn’t know that I even felt, but now you’re feeling it to.

But even after all this time I think I’m finding the rhythm and maybe even a little rhyme. Just like good friends – you can always pick up where you left off. Like riding a bike. The trick is to keep going – as long as I keep pedaling and I don’t look down I can stay balanced. I roll along with the ballpoint of my pen. Over hills of slanted rhymes. Through fields and fields of couplets and triplets and colored tulips as far as the eye can see.  As long as I lean into the wind the words will keep coming, verses flying by faster and faster.

But not easier. Never easier. Writing is like living, like loving. Its sunshine and rain, and bliss and pain. It’s that sweet, deep stretch. The one that makes you groan in pain, but it feels so delicious you don’t want it to stop.

Well maybe it does get a little easier. Easier to keep going. It’s a cycle. Like I said, a bicycle. Round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows. And hopefully this time it won’t stop. 

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Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a very long time. I performed a poem in front of an audience. And I have to admit it was really really scary. I spent the last few days writing and polishing this poem and then I set down to memorization. After a few hours I had it committed to memory and I was excited to share it with my friends, but when the time came and I got up to the mic,  my hands started to shake and my memory faltered. I ended up reading from my notebook. I have so much more respect for college Marybeth and all my Almighty Ink teammates who bared their souls week after week in front audiences of 20-100 people. How the hell did we do that????

Last night was definitely not one of my best performances, but I did it. And it felt good to create something full and (semi)complete...poems are never really complete...and to prep and practice. It was a project, an exercise. The perfect way to open National Poetry Writing Month. Here's to a spring of new poems.