Poetry Thursday supplement

After reading everyone's Poetry Thursday posts (I finally made it through the whole list of posts, and there are some amazing writers in this group!), I remembered another poem I wrote years ago about the process of writing for me, which I think more accurately responds to the prompt about personal or confessional poetry:

genesis

thoughts, armed with daggers
wage battles behind my eyes -
soldiers riding memories -
multi-colored horses pave
hooves into the valleys of my mind

jets of ink wash
over hills and grooves,
flood into the channels of my veins,
deleneating branches, trunks

become a forest

bleed beneath my fingernails,
choke
struggle
to keep afloat in the current behind the rolling ball

emerge victorious,
and print myself
into the fibres
of this page


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This was written over fifteen years ago (before the blog world, hence "fibres of this page", at a time when I was still finding my poetic voice, and struggling with balancing the personal and the poetic. I still read the angst, the struggle that writing had for me back then. I remember feeling the desire to write, but coming to the page and staring at its blankness, or writing, scratching out, and trying again.

I haven't done much poetry writing in the last few years, but I have to say that I never experience this angst in magazine writing. For some reason, the writing comes easier, and sometimes, a poem floats up to the surface, emerging from intense anguish or happiness, or just a line someone said to me.

Ceebie