Love, poetry and the madness of it all
‘I read your blog. There’s a lot of poetry on there,’ said You Know Who You Are.
I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. I can’t honestly tell you why or when I became a poet, but it seems that I am. On my last count I’d written around 150 poems since May and five of those have been written this week! It’s a seemingly never-ending stream of words, rhyme and rhythm that turns up and demands to be written. So I write it.
Like the rest of my writing, my poems are very autobiographical so I need to be a little circumspect in what I publish here on my blog. Social media and the online world is so very open and everyone can know your business (exes and current lovers included) and words can be misinterpreted, too revealing or understood perfectly (horror oh horror). Other times I publish immediately, unable to keep it to myself, but then worry that I have revealed too much (oh the mortification!). Nevertheless, if you read all my poems you would see the outline of my life – its ups and downs, twists and turns and yes, let’s face it, the times when I’ve fallen flat on my face. It’s all there in those poetic words that just won’t leave me alone.
The tone of these works inevitably rise and fall with the happenings in my personal life because they are all connected to love. Love – whether it’s causing a flood or a drought in my life – is always there. And, for those of you who know the tempestuous possibilities of that emotion, I’m sure you would agree with my statement that sometimes love can indeed, drive you to madness.
My poems, when they appear in my psyche and demand to be written, cover all aspects of that madness – the pain, the exhilaration, the gentleness, the devastation, the silence (the most cruel aspect and hateful aspect of all). Not to mention anger, passion and of course, sex (whether you actually have it or just think about having it…all the time!).
Love seems to me to be an inescapable thing. Ever-present and ever-persistent.
The wonderful thing about poetry though, is it helps me to release that madness within. Like many women, I tend to obsess, to cling to that emotional roller-coaster and manipulate every detail in my brain to try and understand just what happened or will happen or might happen. But my poetry perverts the course of this bad habit. It simply grasps all those emotions and forces me to throw them onto the page. The form is not of my design – I firmly believe that is coming from elsewhere. But it is my fingers that fly across the keyboard.
Afterwards I often feel spent, exhausted, sated, like after great sex (okay, incredible sex) or a good cry where your tears fall like torrents. I will wonder if the madness has left me then. I will wonder if there is more to write. How can there be more to say?
Inevitably though, the rhythm will return and I am drawn once again to the black keys on my Mac. Love will haunt me again – love lost, love wished for, love longed for – driving my fingers onwards.
It seems that love holds the soul of poetry for me. So for now, love is all I need, or at least the promise of what I thought it was, or what it could be.
