Poetry

Late-Night Writing

Chris Leave a comment

When midnight approaches
And exhaustion encroaches
I make a silent wish:
Just one more late-night hour
To write and feel the power
I have when I create.

A mind full of thick fog
Permeates my daily slog
When I choose to stay up.
Better fog than the loss
I feel as I turn and toss
When I instead choose sleep.

Second shift and spare time
Is never enough to climb
The mountain before me.
I just want to explore
Writing in a time before
I’m bidding friends good night

So for now I contend
With foggy days that descend
From my late-night writing,
All while hoping someday
I will be able to say
I spend my days writing.

Broken Words (My Self-Titled Post)

Chris 1 Comment

I’ve had this blog for over a year now, and I’ve never shared the poem that inspired the title. I think I’ve talked about it in the past, and I definitely remember writing about posting it eventually, but I figured that would be a good way to start my year of daily posts. And a way to solidify Friday as “Poetry Day” for my blog. So, here it is, without further introduction or preamble:

 

“Broken Words”

What point are there in words,
Hear how sweetly they sing,
When they fail to tell a tale
And no understanding bring?

What point are there in words,
So full of heart and love,
When they can be cast away
and easily disposed of?

What point are there in words,
So full of awe and wonder,
When they fall upon empty heads
And lose their flash and thunder?

What power is there in words,
Only so much empty wind,
That tumble out so carelessly
Like peels from an apple skinned?

What power is there in words,
Nothing more than empty lies,
That I will use to quiet
The tears that fall from your eyes?

What power is there in words,
Such simple seeming sounds,
That form the bones of our speech:
Verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and nouns?

What use have I for words,
Such lovely, crafted things,
When no one quite hears them
Despite their melodic rings?

What use have I for words,
So beautiful and bright,
When they cannot illuminate
Or show anyone the light?

What use have I for words,
So difficult and simple,
That cannot change a heart
Or cause an iron will to dimple?

What words have I to use,
A lexicon at my fingers,
To tell you of the thought
That cannot stay but lingers?

What words have I to use.
So many different choices,
To make you hear inside my head
The many clamoring voices?

What words have I to use,
So many and yet so few,
To make you understand
What I’m saying to you?

What point have I to make,
Flimsy as a tin foil,
That cannot be made by action
And take far less care and toil?

What point have I to make,
Nothing sharper than a spade,
When all the words are dead
And all their parts are played?

What point have I to make,
Swift and small as a pin,
That can pierce the patchwork
Armor that you wear within?

What power have I to take,
To steal so quick and sly,
Your mind and heart away
And leave you with a sigh?

What power have I to take,
Remove with nary a sound,
The echoes of your dreams
That hold you to the ground?

What power have I to take,
To shatter beyond repair,
What you thought you knew
And all that you hold dear?

What words are left to say,
To mumble murmur and mutter,
That will leave my thin mouth
Without a drawn out stutter?

What words are left to say,
Hollow sounds of passing air,
That will show you what I see
And teach you how I care?

What words are left to say,
Gurgle grumble and weep,
To convince you of the truth
That I, within me, keep?

What words of point and power,
To take and make and play,
Can I use to convince you
Of the truth of what I say?

The words of power that make,
The words of point that take,
No matter what one may say,
If you use these words,

they break.

 

NaNoWriMo Day 10 (11/10)

Chris 5 Comments

Sometimes, writing rescues me. A lot of the time, it isn’t my prose, but the poetry I write that helps me the most. When I write a poem, I am taking something I’m either currently experiencing or have experienced enough that I can call it up at will and put it outside of myself. I take the emotions stumbling around my head, capture them in specifically worded and arranged phrases, and then can look at them more clearly. See them for what they really are (which is often just something simple blown out of proportion by my mental illnesses).

Last night, I wrote. I spent almost two hours trying (and failing) to write part of my NaNoWriMo project and then gave it up as a lost cause. I was too full of thoughts, emotions, and anxieties. So I turned my mind toward a poem and a little phrase that had been spinning through my head all afternoon and evening, “broken words and broken moments shower me with shattered words.” From this I eventually produced a poem that felt a lot like the mental equivalent of scraping the contents of a can of cranberry sauce onto a plate without breaking or damaging the cylindrical shape it had held for so long. I may never post it, because it’s really only important to me, but it was a lot easier to write after that was done, even if it cost me another two hours to reach that point.

I’ve spent a lot of time wishing that I wasn’t like this. That I didn’t get caught up in horrible, obsessive thoughts until it starts to seem reasonable to knock myself out as a solution to the noise inside my head. I wish I could handle minor changes to things I’ve planned without spending the next dozen hours wondering what the implications of this change could mean for me and my life. I wish I could actually feel better once I get those thoughts out of my head instead of feeling drained and empty until I suddenly realized that I’m as mentally clogged as a shower drain full of hair. I don’t think I have anything else in my life that I wouldn’t give up if it guaranteed that I wouldn’t have to deal with those kinds of thoughts anymore.

Today, I am tired. It was a long night and today promises to be long as well. I can’t change everything I want to change, but I can keep fighting it with my poetry and learning about it through my prose. I hope that, whatever struggles you’re facing this month, that you can do the same.

 

Daily Prompt

Writing, like any other kind of mental effort, is skill that improves the more you use it. Like a muscle, you need to find ways to use it in new and more difficult ways if you want to become stronger. National Novel Writing Month is both a test and an opportunity to train. You will come out of this month stronger for having tried, whether you fail or succeed. Write a scene for you character that mirrors this. Show them striving or training to improve themselves in one specific area. Show them fail or succeed and then realize that the outcome wasn’t the real goal, but that doing the best they could was.

 

Sharing Inspiration

I like to find things that help create the emotional state I’m trying to write about. A lot of the time, I use music. In a broader sense, all of the stories I read do something similar. However, if I need a strong emotion quickly and can’t find a song, I like to look for poetry that fits. It is a lot easier if its something I wrote in the past because it reflects my actual emotions from the past and is easier for me to pick up and carry for a short time, but any poetry with the right emotional resonance will do the same thing. For this story, one of the poems I lean on to help me get into the mind of the protagonist is Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I suggest giving it a read and seeing what it makes you feel like. Or finding your own poems to make you feel the right thing for what you’re writing.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re staring at the screen and are unable to figure out what comes next, there are a few things you can try. You could try just writing whatever random thoughts come into your head until they (hopefully) align themselves with the story. You could try skipping to a new scene and writing from there. You could, of course, go find a writing prompt and use that to jump-start your writing. Typically, I find that running out of steam and not knowing where to go from there is a sign that you made a wrong turn earlier. I almost always know where it was because something didn’t quite sit right with me, so I head back to that point and explore other options until I find one that feels better. Don’t be afraid to go back and change something, or move in an entirely different direction, if you feel that is what your story needs. Just remember to save what you’ve already written.

What Does That Even Mean?

Chris 2 Comments

25 days after my last post and a solemn promise (even if it was made mostly to myself) that I’d write twice a week, I’m back again. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy changing jobs, missing my old coworkers more than I anticipated, and working myself to the brink of exhaustion at my new job because they pay overtime. I’m a former student with a ton of debt just hanging out. Overtime is the only thing that’s gonna make it go away before my 30’s.

To be honest, the only reason I’m writing this post at all is because of my growing desperation to do something in response to President Trump’s actions. There’s so much wrong with what he’s doing and how he behaves on a day-to-day basis that I often feel that addressing it is hopeless. His supporters are almost impossible to engage because I can’t help but feel that they’re deliberately misinterpreting what I’m saying or that they’re purposefully ignoring everything but the specific interpretation of events that they’ve arrived at.

The worst part of it all is that everyone on both sides of the current issues seems to be leaping to the extremes. I’ve been fairly closely observing the world around me for my entire life and I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so polarizing as President Trump’s campaign and first week of presidency. I’m a Liberal at heart, but I tend to behave fairly moderately. I’m willing to compromise and take smaller steps to achieve lofty goals. I try to avoid being angry with people and believe that everyone, regardless of their words and actions, deserves to be treated like a human. With every passing day of President Trump’s governance, I feel more and more alone in the middle.

The thing is, despite being in the middle, I’m definitely not on the fence. I have very strong beliefs about the way the world should work and I’m quick to point out where there  can be some improvement, but I generally prefer to encourage people to be good to each other than prescribe ways of living. My whole outlook on life and value set can basically be summarizes as “don’t judge people, be kind to one another, and everyone’s rights extend right up to the point where they start to restrict or invade other people’s rights.” Simple enough, right? Hell, you can probably summarize it even better the same way most ancient religions can be summarized: “don’t be a dick.”

Unfortunately, the current president of the USA can’t seem to embrace that idea and seems hellbent on not only undoing all the accomplishments of the past 8 years, but also on establishing himself and his political cohorts as the constant major ruling force of the USA. He seems more interested in pushing the limits of his power than using it to the benefit of the people who put him in office. His pursuit of adulation and wealth borders on the insane, as does his pathological ability to find an insult or slight in everything people say about him. He seems to hate the same way he breathes: automatically and without cessation. He places absolutely no stock in his words, flinging them out without consideration and abandoning the ones he’s dropped in the past in favor of whatever he thinks will best suit his unknown and unfathomable agenda.

He’s pretty much the complete opposite of me, in every way I can find to make a measurable comparison.

To me, words are some of the most important things we have to offer to the world, though song or speech, book or movie, or even the more abstract expressions in the visual arts. Communication. Nothing is more important to me than how we communicate with each other and the ways we choose to do it. That’s the reason I’ve stuck with this admittedly rather dramatic name for my blog. I inwardly cringe ever so slightly every time I read it because it feels so “emo poetry” when I read it to myself. That’s not what the title means to me, though, even if I can’t help avoiding that meaning when I consider it (I mean, I’ve written some of that cringy emo poetry, so I know how it can appeal to a person).

The tagline under the title, “The words of power that make, the words of point that take: no matter what one may say, if you use these words they break.” is the last stanza of a poem I wrote from a collection I’ve never really shown to many people that I call “Speechless.” I struggle with finding the right words a lot. I’ve always liked to take the time I feel I need to be sure of what I’m saying and there are a lot of times I’ve stayed silent because I wasn’t able feel that level of surety. Sometimes I found them too late to be of any good to me and sometimes I never found them at all.

Poetry has always been an emotional outlet for me, a way to take something I’m experiencing and put it outside of myself in a way that I can start to deal with it. For all of the “Speechless” poems, they’re all about times that words failed me. From the simple one-stanza “Words” to the much longer “Broken Words” that goes on for about three pages, they’re all about times I felt myself inadequate to the task of properly expressing myself.

This blog, for those who don’t care to look back to the first post, was supposed to be an attempt by me to push back against my tendency toward silence and my feelings of being inadequate when it comes to self-expression, which is why it was given the same name as the poem that is probably not only the core poem in the “Speechless” collection but may also be the best poem I’ve ever written. “Broken Words” is all about the power that words have and the fact that they will never mean entirely the same thing twice.

Sure, every word has a dictionary definition, but each word we use is affected by the words around it, by who says and when they say it, by the reason they are perceived to have said it and the reason they actually said it, by the way the listener heard it and by the way it might have been overheard by someone else. Words, like people, don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re constantly evolving and their meanings are always open to some interpretation. They’re little crystalline pieces of ourselves that we send out into the world to never get back, even if no one else heard them. Whether they’re the good parts of ourselves or the bad parts is up to the speaker, but they’re always a part of us and they always shatter as soon as they tumble from our mouths or occupy pixels on a screen, never to be seen in entirely the same way again.

I can promise this blog won’t become a platform solely for speaking out against the bullshit I see in the world, but I can’t promise that it won’t more often be my soap box than my creative outlet. As I’ve always wanted to say and never had the chance to, you can’t make a change in the world without breaking a few thousand words.

 

 

 

 

Finally back after Suffering from Plumber’s Block

Chris Leave a comment

I definitely suck at regular updates.

Now no one can say I didn’t warn them when I fall silent for a few weeks. I played a bunch of Pokemon Go until the 3-step bug made it impossible to find anything and then a lot of work-stress coupled with relief from a lot of different work stress has left me avoiding writing for a while. I’m working on getting back to it now (as you can plainly see), but I tend to wind up doing this a lot.

The first thing to go when I get stressed out or my depression starts acting up is my writing. The one thing I have that always grounds me, my most complete escape, my way to speaking out about what troubles me and I abandon it when I need it most. I want to be able to write because it is all those wonderful things for me, but it takes so much from me that I sometimes need to choose rest or not-writing instead. No matter what I want.

The first time I attended an event at which Patrick Rothfuss was appearing/answering questions, someone asked him about writer’s block. Patrick Rothfuss hemmed and hawed for a moment before saying that it was sort of ridiculous that writers have this condition unique to them that explains why some of us can’t seem to get anything written. He saw the somewhat negative reaction of the crowd and asked us to bear with him for a little bit while he explained what he meant.

He explained that, just like a plumber with a broken arm or the flu wouldn’t be expected to fix your plumbing, a writer shouldn’t expect themselves to write if they’re not feeling well. And that’s not just physical illness. He talked about mental illness and the impact it can have on a writer’s ability to work. Writer’s Block isn’t a diagnosable thing. We often use it to talk about times when we can’t write because of our mental health, but it is usually better to recognize what is actually in the way of us writing rather than blame it on something similar to the boogeyman. I often can’t write because of my depression and anxiety, so I own up to that, even if it is only to myself. That makes it a lot easier to get back to writing again since you know when you’re feeling better.

His thoughts about writer’s block really struck home for me and woke me from the sort of blind Hero Worship view I had of him. It made me really start to see him as a normal person. As a Human, rather than some object of worship or reverence. It was kind of like when you look at your parents and realize that they’re only humans as well. They’re not superheroes and to expect perfection from them is to deny them their humanity. To expect perfection from myself is to deny myself my humanity.

I wrote a poem on day when I was feeling a bit more cheerful and bit more blasé about the high expectations I have for myself. Like a lot of my poems, it started off with a bit of a random thought and ran from there.

 

If I were a god
I would be worshipped by frat boys and single mothers.
A god of beer drinking, simple living, and neat little recipes that your kids will love.

If I were a god,
I would be capricious and mighty but also incredibly lazy.
A god of harsh judgment and terrible wrath who just asks you to try to be better.

If I were a god,
I would stride the land cloaked in wind and thunder and rain.
A god of storms who brings nothing but rain on windows and thunder in the distance.

If I were a god,
I would grant my adherents visions of what might be.
I’d give my true believers the sight to see just what they could make of themselves.

If I were a god,
I would have the power to change the world to my liking.
I’d get so tired and angry with all the humans begging for help that I’d strike them down.

If I were a god,
I would encourage self-help and doing it yourself.
A god who helps those who help themselves and let the lazy stay in the dirt and dust.

If I were a god,
I would be most terrible and fearsome to behold.
I’d be the most beautiful entity in all of creation but far too bright to actually see.

If I were a god,
I would rid the world of evil and all that is wrong.
I’d strike down all of those who oppose me and bend the universe to my will.

If I were a god,
I would be an awful mess as you can clearly see.
I’d be breaking all my own rules and constantly at odds with myself.

If I were a god,
I wouldn’t be another human just trying to get by.
But that’s all I am so maybe I shouldn’t expect quite so much of me.

 

Silly and kinda peaceful, but with a bit of something to think about at the end. Exactly my preferred style. Definitely not my best work, but I’m not convinced I’ll ever be able to point to something and say “that’s my best work” so that phrase doesn’t really mean much. But it feels good, you know? To give myself permission to be just a little bit more human than usual.

But that’s why I tend to stop writing. Writing is hard. I have to spend a lot of time in my head and that’s not always such a great place to be. Gaming and reading get me out of my head and into something else. It’s a different kind of escape, specifically for when I need to escape me instead of the world. But now I’m ready to deal with me again so here I am. Updating my blog and working a daily writing session into my schedule.

Cut yourself some slack today. Just, you know, let it go for a bit and pick it up later.