My Room with Black Text

I live in a room, with black text scrawled
On ink-stained pages: typescripts piled
Ceiling-high, I live among notebooks and notes.

I have cabinets of ill-assorted documents,
Drawings sketching roads from there to here:
Roads well-trodden, followed for safety,
And those less-travelled, never taken.

But not for the want of deliberation.

I own machines, now worn and creaking:
Typewriters that came after my pens ran dry,
Recording devices with my shaking voice inside,
Computers and screens, blinking boxes
Where my once-handwritten life was saved.

I possessed a million words and one by one
Spoke them, dragged them across pages
To find out what stories I was meant to tell;

Found and lost, a million stuttered words,
Tangled, conflated, stretched
Beyond the boundaries of meaning.

Stranded in the foothills; on this mountain
I made from dead poetry, made from dislocated
Sentences, sentences half-parsed and ragged,
I am prospecting still for a precious line.

There has been so little rhyme.

And I try to thread these crumbled words
With beads of story. What else is left? So late…
History is a vain word for so much time wasted.

Too many words later, I have come to know
The secret is to let them go.
Little point in making much
Of order, sequence, such and such
Then hoarding them until they die.

Too many words have passed my lips
Or run from nibs and fingertips
Fading away on yellowed pages,
Bleeding and blurring while paper ages.

Too many words gone and left no trace,
Or held hostage in my own dark, secret place;
Dead words that were never meant for keeping
That should have lived where what we need to hear
Lies sleeping.

© BH, 2016

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Just a reflection on the process of so-called writing. Staring, as Douglas Adams said, at a blank sheet till the forehead bleeds. That is one side of it. The other is the mounting pile of verbiage; all the half-made, half-baked masterpieces to be. Only not just yet.

I have to admit the coy urge to keep them until they’re better still prevails. So into the drawer they go. Down the e-pipe to digital oblivion. Or even, heaven forfend, up the wiggly wire to the eponymous cloud wherein whose nebulous anonymosity bugger all happens and no-one gives a stuff anyway.

But this is what I now believe. Write it; let it go. Even if it cowers in the compost pile at garden’s end. So be it. At least it’s free.