—
your need is my desire
your desire is my hope
your hope is my dream
your dream is my heart
your heart is my home
your home is my love
your love is my comfort
your comfort is my need
—
Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category
To Requite
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, love, modern poetry, Poetry, requited love, Writing on 10 Nov 2021| Leave a Comment »
Yeoman
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, death, father, grief, loss, memento, Parents, vignettes on 04 Nov 2021| 2 Comments »
There are, in my home, many watches. But for five years, I’ve carried only one.
My watches date from the Age of Steam to the Age of Jets, bearing the marks of craftsmen from Victorian, Edwardian, Nouveau, Deco, and Mid-Century eras.
I have watches that were used to keep trains running on time, mark a valued employee’s retirement, chime the quarter hour, and show the time in the dark with radium-lit dials. Some glister with ruby bearings and gears of gold, their plates tooled with filigree, their enameled dials bright, while others are of stamped brass, paper faces, encased in cheap tin.
They are the watches of men both rich and poor, bespoke or mass-produced, but all came to me in somnolent neglect and the silence of disrepair. For each of them, I cracked their cases, disassembled their movements, cleaned and repaired and replaced the parts that were begrimed, bent, or broken, bringing them back to life, allowing their spring-loaded hearts to beat once again.
I used to swap them out, carry a different one every week, its chain hooked onto my denim belt loop, the watch itself tucked into the tiny right-hand pocket designed solely for the purpose.
But no longer.
Waltham, Elgin, Hampden, Ingersoll, and the others, high-end or base-born, all now lie stored in cushioned darkness, their mainsprings having ticked down to quiet rest.
Now, my watch pocket is empty, for my wrist carries my watch.
It’s a scuffed and scarred thing, with a crystal that’s a bit scratched, a bit chipped. It isn’t very old—a score of years at most—and it is decidedly plain, with square hands and numbers on a simple white face. It doesn’t even have a mainspring, the coiled powerhouse of nearly every other watch I own, but runs on a battery.
It’s a run-of-the-mill Timex Indiglo wristwatch. And it is my father’s watch.
When my father died, five years ago, and I was cleaning out his last abode, his watch was included in his effects. It is the watch he wore every day, whether he was out fishing for steelhead, sneaking a smoke out back, or painting a landscape, and it is—as was he—basic, uncomplicated, quiet, easy to read, dependable, sturdy, and consistent.
For five years, it’s been on my wrist doing yeoman’s work, ticking away, showing me the wee hours with its cyan glow, keeping perfect time. I’ve never changed the battery, not once in those five years. It is, as I said, dependable, sturdy, and consistent.
Someday, it too will run down, its battery spent, and that day, I suppose, when the new battery clicks into place, that will be when the watch will stop being his, and will then be mine.
k
Fallow Fields
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, Creativity, inspiration, writers block, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips on 28 Oct 2021| Leave a Comment »
Maples at Seattle Arboretum
Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I’m back from a two-week vacation and, for me, two weeks is the minimum required to feel like I’ve actually had a vacation. The first week I spend powering down—sleeping decent hours, relaxing, reading, puttering—but the second week is when my brain finally looks up, sees the sky, hears the birdsong, smiles, and forgets about the day job.
It was a good stay-at-home fortnight, filled with fall colors (in my gardens and around the Sound), blustery fall weather, rain, walks, movies, and even a bit of socializing. It was a rather creative time, as well. I finished building my hurdy-gurdy, cooked a couple of excellent meals, and managed to craft one or two fairly decent pieces for this blog.
But this week . . . eh, not so much.
Granted, the week back at work after well-spent time off is always difficult, but this one has been quite the challenge. You see, my retirement is out there, waiting. I can smell its heady aroma and hear its quiet song, lofted by the onshore breeze. Going back to the day job gets harder each time, but usually (thankfully) there’s a grace period granted to vacation-returnees: sufficient time to go through the mountains of emails; to catch up on all the changes, gossip, and news; and to ramp back up on the work we’d set aside during our weeks away.
This time, though, it was more of a “hit the ground running” type of week. I was met with an excessively aggressive deadline date (promised during my absence), plus a slew of quarterly meetings that stole a whole day that I really could have used trying to meet that promised deadline.
So, today, when I sat down in front of my blank sheet of paper and tried to come up with a poem or vignette, chicken-scratching my way around the metaphor that’s been in my head for a couple of days (family lineage as a river), I came up empty. Empty, that is, except for lines and stanzas written and then struck out, word clouds that dissipated into thin air, and several crumpled sheets of 11×18 newsprint on my office floor (which at least entertained the cat, if only for a few minutes).
I then compounded that frustration by spending the evening trying to solidify new ideas out of the ether—it’s not as though I had no ideas, just that I could bring none of them into sufficient focus to wrap words around—until, in the end, I cried, “Hold! Enough!”
And so here we are.
If I might torture another metaphor, every farmer knows that letting a field lie fallow for a time benefits the land and the crops. So, seeing as how I’ve been very creative during the past few months, I think I can allow myself a fallow week.
Here’s hoping that my crops rebound after the rest.
k
Wolves We Once Were
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged community, individualism, modern poetry, Poetry, society on 21 Oct 2021| 6 Comments »
wolves we once were
and strong
with sharp-eyed mien
and lean-limbed hunger
joining together
to face
our foes
loyal to the pack
we protected our young
aided our weak
our society of many
united
but the fire drew us in
offered us warmth
against the world’s chill
taught us to hoard
the tossed scrap
rather than share
the pack-won prize
wolves we once were
but no more
having chosen the fire
our pack is weak
divided
with fleck-spittle snouts
we snarl at each other
through our broken fences
unable to wonder
who it is
that tosses us
their scraps
Puttering
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, managing stress, modern poetry, Poetry, quiet living on 14 Oct 2021| 5 Comments »
the fraught world
retreats
powerless
in the face of
recycling boxes
tidying the garage
fixing a broken chair
global tensions
dissipate
impotent
against the power of
weeding the garden
harvesting tomatoes
clipping summer’s last rose
folded laundry
smooths global supply chains
clean countertops
muffle rattled sabers
they’re not solutions
but they ease my pain
for an hour
or a minute
and sometimes
that’s all I need
to continue
k
Poems and Spreadsheets: From the Edge
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged from the edge, modern poetry, Poetry, poetry collections, self-publishing on 30 Sep 2021| 7 Comments »
You knew this was coming (either that, or you haven’t been paying attention): From the Edge, a collection of poetry and vignettes, is now live on Amazon! W00t!
In putting this together, I encountered needs that never arose with my novels. Primary among them was the concept of a coherent theme, and right behind that, organization. These aspects were new to me, as with novels they’re just part of the package. Here, though, I was making a whole out of things that were never written as parts of a whole, so theme and organization suddenly took on new importance.
Sure, I could have just collected “poems I like” or “things I wrote in chronological order,” but I wanted the whole to have something to say, as a whole. This goal proved quite a challenge, though, since none of these pieces was written with the others in mind.
The first task, naturally, was to winnow the hundreds of pieces I’d written since the late ’90s into a manageable pile. Immediately I divided them into “Maybe” and “No” piles, a process I repeated, each time with a more exacting eye. Eventually, I had an “Almost Yes” pile of eighty or so pieces, all poetry and short poetic prose that would fit on one or two pages.
Next was to distill from these a theme. This was difficult, and literally kept me up at night. Eventually, though, it became clear that many dealt with a transition, and from that the concept of liminality became prominent. The title, I felt, should evoke that concept, and after trying out many of those, I settled on From the Edge, as in: from the edge of the century, the edge of the continent, the edge of patience, the edge of life, from the edge of a transition from one state to the next.
Then I needed to make a final cut and organize the pieces and here I fell back into true to geek-boy form. I put the pieces in a spreadsheet, analyzed their content, and determined a meaningful structure.
Yes, seriously.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds (or so I tell myself). Many of the pieces had a “seasonal” component, reflecting a certain time of year. Each one also carried an “emotional weight,” and I didn’t want the reader to be hit by (what I felt were) several hard-hitters in a row. Topic was a factor; just as I didn’t want three heavy poems in a row, neither did I want having three “nature” poems bunched together. Finally, the length had to be considered, both (again) to avoid clumps of longer works, but also (and more importantly) to ensure that the works requiring two pages could be read without breaking the flow by turning the page.
The result is a selection of nearly fifty pieces, from winter to winter, exploring the nature of transition and transformation.
Or, at least, that is the intent.
The last decision I made was to break with one of my guiding principles and only offer this in hardcopy. Presentation has a greater impact on poetry than on prose, and I spent many (many) iterations getting the font, format, and layout just right. If I were to adapt the book to a digital format, most of that would be lost, so, sorry-not-sorry, you won’t be able to read these in Arial or Times New Roman on your phone. Want to read them? You’ll have to go old-school.
So, From the Edge is alive and has been released into the wild. Go catch one (if you can)!
k
Born on the Cusp
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, modern poetry, Poetry on 23 Sep 2021| 2 Comments »
Born on the cusp
between two worlds
he never looked back
except with sadness
nor reminisced
but under pressure
from sons and daughters
eager to learn his source.
He kept that world
of loves and wars
tucked tight away
in his heart’s attic
for the world of his now
was challenge enough
without memories
of one that was no more.
k
