I would rather die on the page
Than at 3am on the freeway
Driving to Salinas with the devil
At my back, an empty coffee cup
And a rancid fast food sack.
I would rather crash and burn
These words together
Skidding unruly verbs
To see what thought sticks
And which action hurts,
Than to spend a life stitching the edges
Of fragments of mundanity,
No matter what calamity:
Is all just boiled eggs, puke and bricks.
I would rather drown at 30,000 words
Than go down on that shaky fishing boat,
I can write myself a heroine
Who can teach the fishes how to float.
I cannot fathom, no matter how simple
How I can live silent and still
Like a nun with her wimple
And her hands on the rosary,
Speaking old verse devoted to keeping
Her living far too hopefully.
Or stoic and hard working with
Washerwoman fingers, scrubbing
The filth from a dozen miserable malingerers
With hungry infant faces
And ravenous starving bellies
Who suck the marrow from the bones
Of a million regretful nannies.
All these paper soldiers I write in
Acts one, two and three,
Shooting origami tigers
Up in molded plastic trees
Have no use of bullets, just
Staccato rhyming meter.
Their glory runs on adjectives,
Their deaths mostly conjured up imagined
In shades of cordite and saltpeter.
But nothing cools the ardor
Of those ravenous hungry hordes
That I wrote last Thursday,
Or dulls the silver of their swords.
No smile will ever be as lovely
As the one on the protagonist's lips
As she realized beauty and how
Everything about her neatly fit.
No, life is not as concise
Nor edited for clarity,
Most of us bobble along hopeful
For some act of human charity.
Soul mates do not find each other
Walking down the road,
Of if they do the princess is left
Realizing she has kissed some
Mean old ugly drunken toad.
I have no use for realism,
Magic or otherwise,
I don't wish to write another
Episode of lords and kings and flies.
I don't care much for romance,
At least that is what I say,
But as I wrote them kissing
My mind started to fray.
Horror is always with me,
Drama, my greatest enemy,
And when I am happily tapping,
The laptop on my knee,
Everything is so ordered
And lives so wild and free.
I keep thinking I should get out
Talk to someone living,
But then a brawl breaks outside
And sends the daytime reeling.
I would rather die on the page
And then breathe some life back
In by the next chapter,
Than deal with the hostile reality
Made by others who live to make that
Looking glass mirror world
Crack from side to side and shatter.
I've had my seven years
Over and over again -
And yet more tragedy
Comes pouring out this pen.
I don't want to admit words
And lives are linked -
Symbiotic,
Flesh and ink,
But of course they are;
You can't destroy the world
Only write it into lack of limitations
If I could only live in the pages
I wouldn't have to dream of no
Creative insurrection.
But my rebellion is contained
In syllables and principles,
It lives for tiny moments
Like the gilding on church steeples,
It is quashed and it is reasoned with,
It is sullen and it is tired
And every night when I put
The pen down, the muse threatens
Me with ideas
Or else boasts about
Trying to get me fired.
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Very impressive! You should submit to my page!
Thank you, Deidre! Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you as well.
Thank you for the offer, Deidre, but I only write for my own blog or else for payment. You have a lovely website, thank you so much for the offer.
Not a problem! Thank you for liking the website content.
Thank you too! I know how much work it is to get a website looking and running well, with great content!
Thank you! I needed to hear that 🤩
Another fine poem…do love the ending of this one…my muse has been threatening me for years about getting me fired. 🙂
Ah, what the muse doesn’t tell you is that you are the one to fire her, not the other way around! She does like to keep her captives in her thrall…wicked woman! 😀
What a wonderful piece of poetry! It’s excellent, and I enjoyed it so much. You are very talented. This is the first post I’ve read of yours, and I’m very impressed. I’m looking forward to reading more of them. I loved the spoken word recording too. Were the narrator for that?
Hello! Yes, I record all my own work, and it is all on my soundcloud poetry channel – https://soundcloud.com/detroit-richards-539793049
I am so glad you enjoyed the piece. I spend a lot of time writing about sad and painful, but rarely just have fun. I am currently editing the first 40,000 words of a novel that I am writing, and decided that a poem was in order to commemorate the process. Very nice to meet you, Ellie!
Thanks for the link – I’ll take a listen. I love spoken word poetry. I have to say, I’ve written my fair share of sad and painful posts (some poems), but that was a good while back. I’m feeling a bit more positive now, so I tend to write about more positive things (not always, though). I can only write poems when the mood takes me. Forty thousand words is a heck of a lot of pages to edit, especially when there’s a whole load more to edit after that. A poem is an excellent way to commemorate such an occasion.
I look forward to getting to know your work too. I am so sorry to hear you went through a period of painful times. I am a ruthless editor of my own work. I have to say I don’t enjoy editing much, but it needs to be done. Really nice to meet you, Ellie and thank you for much for the feedback, it is very much appreciated!
Thank you very much.
In agreement with everyone above, I have to say that is an impressive piece of writing. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to die while in a dream, but I’ve never thought of dying in the middle of writing a novel – yet that is a kind of dreaming too. I wonder if, for example, Dickens might have been writing Edwin Drood when he left. Could it be that he finished the story?
There is a song by Kate Wolf called “Unfinished Life”. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw2GKMRrtDQ&feature=share
“An open ended dream that I don’t want to wake,” she sings so sweetly. People cannot make other people happy for long, but there is a certain satisfaction in writing something permanent and undying, despite how life falls off and leaves all of us mid-sentence. I am scared of death and still trying to make sense of it. I think I always be, no matter what journeys I take. Have a wonderful day, Alan. Thank you for saying hello today. I’m not having a great one.
Oh, thank you for that! I just listened to her and it’s a beautiful song – just did some reading – so she was there all through the 60s yet I missed her. One reason that I’m still lost in the past, sometimes, is that I keep finding things there. As for Death, at age 75 with so much left to write, I keep one I on it. Trouble is, it might look a few yrs away but it can take you tomorrow.
I have written a piece on her, it is on my blog. She was an absolutely wonderful singer songwriter who deserved far more success than she got. So glad you enjoyed her song. Here in California is also beautiful. Keep on keeping on, the world needs bright fun people with a lot to say. ~D