A Poem for Writers of Fiction

I want to be everyone else

and I pray for some great undoing of self

To look beyond my own reflection

with its echo chambers of introspection

*

I want to see through eyes that are not my own

To walk as another through the ungrown

To write in pictures and paint in words

To hear that which has gone unheard.

*

I want to feel a different truth

sat at your table laid under your roof

to taste your food with a virginal tongue

to believe here, too, I could belong.

*

I want to dance to another tune

On faraway shores beneath a blue moon

Where heaven sparkles, weeps and cries

Its constellations beaded in sighs

*

I want to walk in your shoes

To feel your pain and become imbued

with the refractions of life, only you can see

to rebirth perspective to set mine free

*

I want to know what has gone unsaid

What monsters lie beneath the bed

What keeps you awake and sends you to sleep

What secrets have you been told to keep?

*

I want to learn what it is you desire

When you sit alone, in the dark, by your fire

What story would you want to live?

What worlds for you could I gift?

*

I want to speak with tongues unspoken

To bring meaning to that which lies broken

with words that drip in ink as tears

adventuring through realms, facing fears

*

I want to unhang myself from all old rope

with its fixed lenses and ground-in tropes

to run freely between the woods and the trees

to speak as the great and the small with ease

*

I want to hear a song in the buzz of a fly

to understand the wisdom bestowed by the sky

to hear philosophy in a baby's babble

and weave it all together into a sense that travels

*

I want to find more than myself

in the book that I finally put on that shelf

if only I could find the time for negative capability

and submerge myself empathically

to convey that much more than the limits of me.

***

Authors Note:

Yep. I am having a bad day of writing. Words are coming out of me like kidney stones. It's truly painful. So, I thought I would write a bit of a poem about what was causing my creative mojo to solidify into rocks. This is the result.

You know what they say - a pain shared is a pain halved, or perhaps it's that misery loves company. Who knows? I do feel better from the purging, so I guess the idea has paid off a little.

Although, this kidney stone analogy is pretty naff.

Anyway... A few other thoughts while I am here and rambling on with myself:

The term Negative Capability is something I have been obsessed with for years. It was coined by Keats in a letter he wrote to his brothers about why Shakespeare was such a good writer, believing it was because he could lose himself in the story without the constraints of the rational or of reason. T.S. Eliot, in "The Tradition and The Individual Talent", describes the concept as 'the progress of the artist [to] continual [ly] self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Virginia Woolfe in "To The Lighthouse" shows her character, Mrs Ramsay, actively engaged in the process of negative capability "until she became the things she looked at." Many famous and talented authors reference the process of negative capability as the key to their success. Browning, Byron, Coleridge etal all extol its necessity.

To be fair, I rarely have a problem losing myself, it's more that I keep finding myself and falling over who I am. In essence, I am having re-entry problems.

Life has a way of calling you and holding you in lane, and for a writer, as Walter Percy says, in his bizarre book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, "Unlike the scientist, the artist has re-entry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

Yeah, baby, I feel that on rinse and repeat today!