A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Seven

Last night, after posting on here, I wound up writing another poem.  It was at a far later hour, and was something that occurred because a friend was visiting and I was sitting waiting for him to get done with some personal business.  I was bored, so I pulled open a new document and drafted a poem.  It has been a long time since I did anything like that, in a way.

I mean, I am writing each day, a lot, as regular readers know.  My current average is at four poems a day, and that is great.  But, last night, it was just a moment stolen when I could get a bit more done, and it felt wonderful in a different way.  Having the ritual and practice of writing has granted me a lot, and I am certain that the connection to the work that came spontaneously last night is a result of that, but I am aware that their are times when I need to just let myself feel the desire to write, even if I am in the midst of some other activity.  I mean that I need to be open to that sudden burst, as much as I am committed to the more regimented work.  Both have a role to play.

Today, I got four new poems as usual.  I am rather smitten with one, in particular, though it is a bit odd and will probably need a bunch of work to make it really right.  It is a personal, confessional, piece, but about something odd enough that I can see people thinking it is not that but a sort of metaphor.  In many ways, I have the feeling that much of my life is like that.  I wrote a poem last week and realized that a reader who knows me well thought it was all made up, but it was a reflection on a family story my dad used to tell.  Maybe all of us are odd enough that if we told some of our truths, others would see them as crafted fabrications of delicate meaning and metaphor.  But, then, I think about the fact that my name is two forms of the verb "to be": will and may, with  I am snuck in as well.  Beyond that, my parents had two attached apartments where I grew up with the door numbers of 2B and 2C.  Details in my life seem, at times, to have a heavy symbolism...

Again, that is probably something everyone experiences to an extent, but I think it may be part of why I am a poet.  If not the symbolic nature of these things, my own proclivity for noticing it....

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