If You Have an Idea, Write it Down

If you have an idea, write it down.

Your best ideas will find you

when you are not searching.

The ideas that are meant to meet you

will settle on your forehead

in the stillness between dreaming and waking.

*

The scribbles on scrap paper,

the anecdotes in the notes on my phone

are where the truth lives.

The ideas that wish to be known

and certainly those I am meant to say,

appear fully formed in my brain

unbidden, waiting,

living snug under the bedcovers,

falling softly from the showerhead,

crunching beneath the soles of my shoes.

*

They wait for the curtains to open,

they wait for the clouds to part,

they wait for relaxed shoulders and clear eyes

that see best in the dark.

These ideas are not choked by daytime inhibition,

or shirked by priority or released by omission,

when they dwell in a rainbow-hued haze.

*

I must write them without thinking,

allowing the sounds to roll off my tongue,

through my pen

into being.

I must drift with them above time

and soar with them on clouds

before the sunlight shines

and my jaw clamps down

on reality.

I must make my reality.

*

On finding these ideas later

I always wonder who wrote them.

Though I know it was me.

There is no one else it could be.

If you have an idea, write it down.

***

Author's note: I wrote this poem after finding an idea for a short film in the notes app on my phone (under a tab titled 'Story Ideas', which I don't recall creating). I smiled the entire time I was reading the notes because it's actually decent, and yet, all I could think was, where did I come up with this? Upon further inspection, I discovered it was written at 2:00am. I often let ideas drift away. I'm going to stop doing that. This is my reminder.