The Poetry Bus stops here!

The theme at hand is something you like that other people don’t like. Or you’re afraid they don’t like it. Or you think they think you’re strange for liking it. Mine is below. Leave me a comment letting me know you're on board, and I'll put a list on the sidebar.

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Working late.

4:30

the workday is petering out

the 8 to 4 crowd has gone home, a second wave putting on their coats

the lingering 9 to 5's are wrapping up early, eager to be out the door on a Friday and on with their lives

But am I hurrying home to family?

I'm waiting for 5 too

for those golden hours of early evening

when the phones and the arguments and the questions

have fallen silent

and I can get something done at last.

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When I write a poem, it’s always all at once. I might think about it for a few days, just a ghost of an idea kicking around in the back of my mind, and I often take a note of the next P-bus assignment. Get it into the notebook. Get it into the brain differently, because writing uses a different bit than reading, because of the mechanical, drive-the-hand stage. Get those motor neurons involved. But when it comes to getting the poem onto paper or a screen, it’s always a one-shot thing. Perhaps minimal editing later, but I’m not a person to write a poem and then go back and work on it and change it around and delete half and add another chapter later. Not like an article or an essay at all.

There’s something about the mood of a poem. I can never get back to just that state of mind. If I start changing things in a new state of brain, it’ll all get changed, and there’s no point in that; it’s another poem.

So I wanted to drive the bus twice in a row in order to do something different.

For next week it's me again, and I would like poems built up over time. A couplet a day or however you want to do it, but I want the different attitudes of different days and lights and temperatures to be in there. No one-shot wonders. A collection of shots, okay. It’s more of a structure than a subject. If you’d like a subject too, write about time, change, or evolution.

Off we go!

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