Month of Poetry #23: Birthing the Poem

sometimes there is definitely a plan -
a narrative to be explicated, a serious mood to be conveyed
the pregnancy of a thousand sighs to be bottled and poured out
clucking into the glass like a morose cherry-noted merlot

sometimes it's all a bit more random and chaotic, really;
images and soundbites failing cheerily to coalesce
and you wonder, can I do anything with homecoming
Or the Wombles, or that tooth-grindingly annoying earworm of Taylah Swift's -
you know the one, with the baffling line about her Starbucks lovers
Or, perhaps, claustrophobia, panic, and death;
Or maybe the sharp way the salt air bites your nostrils -

sometimes it doesn't show up at all, and you are left to try to flog life into dead words
while your muse laughs into her gin down the pub

sometimes it builds and teases for days and weeks
sometimes it speaks itself in a dream that fades before full wakefulness

sometimes it's craft, sometimes it's inspiration
more often than either, it's the strange glancing way the light catches a cat's eye
or the music in a fairy penguin calling to her young
the immense sadness in a child's bruised knee
the oddments of living, that all give flashing glimpses
of something else beyond

sometimes it feels like the only way you have to say what you have to say
the only language available robust enough to do the job; then again,
sometimes it feels as inscrutable as the Milky Way, coming through you, but not of you

sometimes it is the easiest thing imaginable to do;
sometimes the labour is long and bloody.

sometimes you think you might not do it anymore.
mostly, you know you don't really have that choice

because, every night,
the muse, quietly, folds wings around your tenderness, and
promises a song in the morning.

- Kathy, 23/1/15