My sleeping has been pretty erratic recently. I have a sense of urgency, something that almost feels like panic but isn't. One of the wonderful things about writing poetry is the clues it can give us about all the feelings and responses we have inside us that we do not have names for yet. Most of my work begins as a freewrite. This is this morning's poem written before the traffic began and when the house was still asleep. It has a deliberately attention seeking title and one, I hope, that makes the connection between procreativity and creativity. Pregnant Again
Perhaps you get to be awake at this hour because the one who's always looking for the moon is up, tugging at your sleeve, telling you to open the shutters and face the milk-black sky and just wish on the cloud thick neon hum, the blue choked with the night time orange. Just wish on anything. Even if it's invisible or, worse, not even there at all. Do it anyway and feel the sensation of hope, that slow crawl inside you. The thing that tells you hard as you are, you are not a lizard. You are a creature so big, one of such impossible substance and size that desire will always be thorny. An appetite like this can not be fed with just one gulp. Get over yourself. Love the insomnia and the moon-cry girl. Wear what you must to face the weather, breeches if you must - anything you can ride a horse in. The mythical won't wait and, like your wide-awake heart needs the sort of song you only sing when facing the sea, with a belly full of whiskey and too many stories to tell in one night. So give in to it. Let it spill. You may feel like a rock, but the shell is there for the cracking. Tell it like it is. Howl at anything that will listen. Live a little. Break open. Yolk or blood it will run and run. Let it. Breathe and pray. And let the wishes run your hours, pregnant again with the possibility of being more than you are.