How to write a poem:

Dance with words
Lyrical steps
In time and space
Flow and spin letting the words dance

Dance to the beat
Measure the steps
Find the words that span
meter and rhyme across
dance

Dance, dance
short steps
repeat the steps
find the movement and let it flow

Release the mind and see the image
Hold the world in a word
Spin your partner
and see the word
Dance.

See the old prose
sitting on the bench
too large for its pants
stand and shed
reduce and free
and dance

Let your fingers dance across the keys
Don’t fear the music in your ears
Ignore the critic and just let the words
across the keys dance.

Move forward and back
and round and round
Take the idea in hand
and spin it round your back

Quiet now and listen
Hear the words whispered in the wind
Half-formed
Half-known
Half-yearning
listen and take up the word
and dance

Dance to your tune
FInd the word the is the rhythm
Tap it out
build on the beat
Add a juxtaposition

Dance to the meter
and let the melody
rise and take its voice

Now sing
and the poem takes form
———————————–

Today in church we sang the song, “The Lord of the Dance.”  I’ve been unable to get the tune out of my head.  It just keeps starting, “Dance, dance wherever you maybe…” and the repeating.  It’s something I am supposed to learn.  I think I know but am afraid to say out loud for fear I might have to actually do something about it.  If I keep my brain ignorant, I can stay as I am and not,

Dance.

Joy isn’t something that comes naturally to me.  I don’t play much, mostly I work.  I work with tools and words.  I build things.  I make things.  I support people who work.  I enable work.  I am known to have a bit of a sense of humor which I like to think of as playful.

But,

Often it is just a defense – a way to get you to back away laughing and not get too close to the real me.  The real me is sometimes not a joyous outburst of energy.  It is more often a long todo list – of work.  It doesn’t dance.

Sometimes it sings a sea shanty – a working song – but it doesn’t dance in the rigging.

Tonight’s writing was supposed to be serious.  I had this long piece planned all about my need for creativity and the need to make things – work by another name.  There was this subsection in my head about how I write poetry and instead the above weird poem came out.

After months of work on the house and intense work at the office I find the need to play and dance.

Perhaps next week I’ll write that serious work on growing up in the cold war and how that experience has shaped my life.

or perhaps we’ll just dance.

Till next week,
Andrew