You Want Me

As daylight dims across the room,
A hunger burns you deep.
It stirs the blood within your veins
And keeps you from your sleep.

A shiver trickles down your neck
And siphons out a sigh.
In whispered breaths of lustful glee,
You part your panting thighs.

You yearn to feel your fingertips
Caress my wanting skin
And ache to feel your manhood firm
Against my flesh within.

But darkness falls against the walls
And hides the tears you shed,
And wraps you in its emptiness
Upon its empty bed

Far deep into the haunting night
Where love and distance war,
And parted lips but dream the kiss
Our hearts are longing for.

Bliss Carman

This poem by Bliss Carman has always been one of my favourites. It has inspired me to write outside myself and has encouraged me when I didn't understand my own melancholy silence.


The Eavesdropper
Bliss Carman (1861- 1929)

In a still room at hush of dawn,
My Love and I lay side by side
And heard the roaming forest wind
Stir in the paling autumn-tide.

I watched her earth-brown eyes grow glad
Because the round day was so fair;
While memories or reluctant night
Lurked in the blue dusk of her hair.

Outside, a yellow maple tree,
Shifting upon the silvery blue
With tiny multitudinous sound,
Rustled to let the sunlight through.

The livelong day the elvish leaves
Danced with their shadows on the floor;
And the lost children of the wind
Went straying homeward by our door.

And all the swarthy afternoon
We watched the great deliberate sun
Walk through the crimsoned hazy world,
Counting his hilltops one by one.

Then as the purple twilight came
And touched the vines along our eaves
Another shadow stood without
And gloomed the dancing of the leaves.

The silence fell on my Love’s lips;
Her great brown eyes were veiled and sad
With pondering some maze of dream,
Though all the splendid year was glad.

Restless and vague as a gray wind
Her heart had grown, she knew not why.
But hurrying to the open door,
Against the verge of western sky

I saw retreating on the hills,
Looming and sinister and black,
The stealthy figure swift and huge
Of One who strode and looked not back.

Blank

Writers write primarily because they have something to say. Words just happen to be the medium used to translate their thoughts and feelings to others. I keep coming up blank, empty. I have so much inside that is bursting to get out; my head and my heart are filled with un-decipherable thoughts and feelings, that have no words. And all attempts to write are pathetic graspings at straws. My untouchable muse seduces me with its lie and I believe it every time. So I begin to write...

...and still come up blank!

Words...words....words!

I thought the fear that was keeping me from writing was either the fear of failure or success. But now I really don't think so. I've known the pleasure of having my work accepted and published and the disappointment of having it rejected.

But this fear is of a more basic kind, more damaging, because it is preventing me from writing at all. This fear is the one that makes me run away from my feelings, that keeps me from staring them square in the eyes and identifying them. Without this honest connection to myself, my writing has become superficial and dull.

In order to write poems that are emotionally moving, I have in the past had to feel the emotions myself while I'm writing them. Without this ability to jump into my poems, they become mere words on a page.

So now I write in the hopes that my own words will spark my muse and once again jump start my heart.

New Beginnings

I have recently been trying different writing exercises to tickle my muse. I've been dabbling more in free verse lately and my outpourings seem to be about the death of the rhymer within me. Here is my most recent poem.


Something deep inside of me
Died.
And as falling leaves
Float through a cold air,
Tears scar my face,
Turning it wrinkled and pale.

Words are silenced

The music stops

The dance is over

Deep shadows fall over the place
Where waltzing steps
Once played
In the powdery, orange glow
Of evening.

Now
only dust
Settles to the floor.