Had other things to comment on today; waiting for a load of laundry to chug and clank its way through its last cycle…

The Eternal Sleep…

I can’t think of anything to write.

My mind’s a blank.

My computer’s acting up.

   (Oh pish! They’re always acting up. Heard of a

   pencil?)

I need to be sitting in a coffee shop,

my favorite chair, the library, when the children are asleep, etc., etc.

Oh, yatta, yatta, yatta. Excuses of the lazy and uncommitted. That tortured writers’ block is a fallacy concocted by unfocused procrastinators.

The children asleep, one can almost understand. Constant interruptions of daily life can indeed take away from focused writing. Others, who are not writers, simply cannot wrap their little lime Jell-O brains around the fact that flowing, interlaced results, require singular thought flow. Wouldja take out the trash…? to them seems such a minor thing.

   And yes, the other distractions to writing are indeed irritating…but not all eliminating. Earplugs work wonders.

Learning to write through adversity and distraction; whether it be complete end-to-end thoughts, or simply making do with a situation and collecting some thoughts on paper as notes, revising, editing, observing (not daydreaming), spell-checking…anything to keep one in-the-groove. If one simply stays out of the swimming pool because of irritations or distractions, one never perfects any sort of a stroke, their breathing or improves their time—one is obviously, then, not committed to themselves and their desire, not a real competitor. No real goal development. That perfect place and moment to write will most likely never be had.

An excerpt. Altered, here, just enough to allow it to fall into what is normally accepted as “poetry.” Lines broken, and punctuation at those line ends eliminated. When, oh when will we grasp: line ends in cohesively written poetry can most often go without punctuation, dits and diggles of ink, that serve little more than visual impediments to smooth reading and thought—the actual break serving as an automatic, built-in pause; comma, semi-colon.

Excerpted from: H, Melville’s, Moby Dick:

“The long-drawn virgin vales

the mild blue hillsides

as over these there steals the hush, the hum you almost swear that play-wearied

   children

lie sleeping in these solitudes

in some glad May-time

when the flowers

of the woods are plucked.

And all this mixes

   with your most mystic moods

so that fact and fancy, halfway meeting interpenetrate

and form one seamless whole.”

“Poetry” is indeed only waiting to be discovered by those who inspire themselves.

Max tdc