Arlene Corwin writes

I NEED THAT DRUG

 

It’s 4am and I’m awake,

And so I take up Mac
Who sits beside,
And grope for pen to start the ride
Into a poem,
For phrase and rhyme of the most nebulous formation
Have installed themselves into my equally
Unclear and foggy brain train station.

Left to need a drug to write,

This sluggish mind awake this night

And cloudy when it’s morning light,

Won’t think, won’t write,

Cannot create

Until that cup of coffee.

So, until the sun comes up 

And hubby brings that morning cup

With warmed milk and a pancake.

I remain unwillingly awake

Mac’s screen the only source of luminescence,

Pen and paper of the essence

Funny ponderings, mental wanderings, 

Scrawling like a daft bedbug

Waiting for the morning gulp 

To bring my muse to shape and type

The rest.

[I tumbled upon this just as I was about to write Starting Or, A Poem Is Born.  Coincidence, or what!]

           Starting  Or, A Poem Is Born

Without a view I let it run.

A TV phrase, some conversation;

Bits and pieces and it’s from:

An Arlene outlook

To become a book - or part of.

No feminist, (an interview I saw this morning)

More existential - virtues, vices, death and forming,

Day’s corruption in the news;

Things that I can’t excuse, -

Though I may see them in myself.

In the end, what comes from is a poem

Where paramount concerns have been 

The right word chosen from an hundred such,

A new nuance with just the touch it needs to make it clear,’

Bring it near enough so he and she can get it.

As I said, I almost never start out with a viewpoint,

Though there are exceptions, as I think about it.

I react to cruelty, brutality, entirely viscerally.

Then it shapes itself, (the poem, its meat)

In cynical or bittersweet

Attack.

Back to the start:

It’s intellect and heart which letting loose, impart

Truths as I see them.

Thus, a poem.