Time To Play

It is a pristine page, clean on the blue screen 

where I compose, I don’t expect it to stay that way 

as words glow from blunt, abused fingers, as insistent 

sounds in my head translate into sentence structures, 

as lips articulate the rhythms and the sounds of the 

jumbled lexis as swiftly as I can unleash them. I couldn’t know 

what might emerge tonight, I only knew the gripping tightness 

in my mind and the pressure, the indecent urge to express 

and let the dammed words flow. 

It isn’t always this way, there are times when I know 

within a line or two what I must write, like when some event 

has incited raw passion or wrenched me from my feet 

or I have staggered unbalanced from fright or fear, despairing 

its sheer effrontery, beaten and contrite. But not tonight. 

Tonight I am free to roam in the growing fields and taste 

whatever delights are imagined, to follow the whim of the wind 

and the random flights of thistledown inviting my errant 

delinquency – to go with the flow.

If I had known poetry could do this for me I’d have 

surrendered a long time ago, grown fat on the back 

of my promised muse with hair sleek and long to the waist, 

wearing kaftans with no shoes, speaking in tones. 

As it goes I have time to play without haste the games 

that engage me most, write when the urge makes havoc 

with good intent, dispense with guilt-management and 

stress, lend common-sense enough rope to tether itself 

beyond hope of poetic redress.

© 1970, I.D. Carswell