When the muse calls

poetry 57238I’ve been writing poetry. ‘What?! You, poetry?’ you could be forgiven for exclaiming in shock. It is unexpected and I’m right there with you in the shock department.

The last time I wrote poetry was in high school and I still have some of it in one of my old teenage diaries. That exercise book is filled with the angst and agony of youth. It’s unlikely I would ever show it to anyone because it’s not the quality I’d want to promote now. Nevertheless, it was an honest exploration of where I was at, at the time.

I don’t know if the poetry I am writing these days is any better. It began to appear a little while ago and has, in the last couple of weeks, become a raging torrent determined to be written at every opportunity.

The muse usually arrives in the late night, when I often feel the most creative. Around 10pm the words will begin to arrange themselves in my brain and the rhythm of the language begins. It chugs like the wheels of an old steam train, building momentum and pushing me towards my laptop. I can be in the middle of something else, or desperately tired, but still it demands an expression. And once I give in, and my fingers begin to fly across the keyboard, I have to type and type and type until the poem is done. Some of them are five pages long!? Even when I want them to be done, there is more to come. The rhythm continues until it is spent so on I go until the ending is reached. I cannot pause before; I am not permitted. The muse insists and so I must follow.

Some nights and even during the day (when the muse also makes unexpected appearances), I ask for a moment’s peace. Let me rest, I ask. I’m granted a reprieve for a time but it always returns, demanding more.

The themes are bright and distinct like the colours of a rainbow – passion, love, anger, destruction, madness and redemption, yet they merge at the edges and sometimes all appear within one piece. They wring my emotions from me until I believe there can be none left – I sob, I yell, I smile, I feel anger, joy, love, hope and despair. Yet still there is always more. Like most of my writing it is reflective of my experience. But there is an essence in the work I have not found before. It is another layer of my being unwrapped in rhyme and rhythm. My emotional undoing has undone the strings and poetry has fallen out. How strange.

‘Is there a book in this? Who on earth reads poetry these days anyway?’ I ask myself. Yet the muse does not care for these questions. Instead it (he? she?) demands an opening for its expression and I must heed the call. So the poetry continues sometimes three or four a day, and I must write it.

Is it any good, you might well ask. My answer: I have absolutely no idea. But still it is there to be written and I must write it. It’s a compulsion that keeps me up late and then I sleep late before repeating it all again. I’m writing these very words at 12.43am!

I see the structure of the words and the story they will tell. It’s a brutally honest and confronting one. It’s also a surprise and I worry I’ll lose the trail of thoughts. I worry the muse will disappear and not return, leaving the work unfinished and hanging like a flag at half-mast, never reaching its potential.

But although it may rest for a day or two, the muse always returns with fresh demands. Its rhythm coursing through me as it commands my fingers deep into the night, and the marauding possums romp through the trees outside my window exploring their mysterious dark world, just as I explore the darkest recesses of my mind.

The muse continues.