Semi-Automatic Writing

2:32pm: Creative Process: (haiku-ish)
I'm baking some cookies
and I hope that someone eats them.
If they won't, I will.

5:05am: Recovery
I feel that I'm finally getting my poetry back. During the late months of last fall, my poetic edge got sharper and sharper until it turned into a monofilament and I could hardly wield it without chopping my own fingers off. The two see-saws that seem to best form my poetic sense -- aloneness/peoplespace and sense/nonsense -- both got overbalanced in unexpected directions.

During November there was too much aloneness and it made too much nonsense and I couldn't know what I meant for a while. Then there was too much peoplespace, and the edge dulled, and I could only make sense, which was all right since I was writing a novel and novels need lots of sense and continuity and order.

But two poems came to me today, short and real. And I wasn't on a trip, which I was the last time I caught one.

I am pleased. The last I was writing poems heavily was November, and all my words then were turning into syllables, all my syllables turning into buses and butterflies, making these beautiful mad-talk pieces that felt like the poetic equivalent of framing a handful of water and calling it a mirror, but I prefer the glass-and-metal kind, and worried, for a while, that my muse had gone schizophrenic forever.

8:10pm: dangerous
Why is my journal called "Semi-Automatic Writing"? First of all, it's a play on "automatic writing"; but also, it's a nod to the idea that words are sharp and treacherous, that when you fire off a poem (or stand in front of one) you must be willing to accept the consequences: the hail of ideas that follows can destroy.

Why was my last entry entitled (more dangerous poetry)? --

I felt, while writing it, as if at any moment I could slip and fall off the edge of language . . .

If that's not danger, I don't know what is.

6:58pm: Hello, anonymous readers!
Most of this journal is friends-locked, so if you do not have your own livejournal login and would like to see the contents, go over and ask demondara (that's my cat) if you can use her journal. Leave your email address lying around, and if you're someone I know, she'll send you the password.

Enjoy!

10:56pm: Breaking Apart
This is the day the world went wrong.
The truth will out, the bell will ring.
You cannot stand on what breaks apart under you.
The word factory is going to dust.

The truth will out, the bell will ring
For every second of deadly silence.
The word factory is going to dust
And no ear is deaf, no lips are mute forever.

For every second of deadly silence
a spell is cast, a curse woven,
And no ear is deaf, no lips are mute forever
To the ringing words that break the hex.

A spell is cast, a curse woven,
broken by the box flung open --
To the ringing words that break the hex,
You have no power over me!

Broken by the box flung open:
You cannot stand on what breaks apart under you.
"You have no power over me!"
This is the day the world went right.

10:15pm: Response To A Challenge</a
Today I shattered
a mirror. Out came
myself, dripping and globular,
a liquid painted face, silver-edged
and thicker than tears or blood.

Behind the swollen glass I had
laid parasite eggs with my eyes.
To hatch them? A swift
cesarean cut. The phantom mother?
Dead in childbirth. No regret.