Escapology

while I was writing this
my creaking pen echoed
the music randomness makes
the stroke of my keys repeated it
like a drumming in the nerve

while I was writing this
letters and words black on white
picked meaning from the blank page
turned the chaos of my thinking
into shapes on paper and screen
flickering like broken sunlight
fading to dusk and dust

as I was writing
looking sideways in a black dream
I saw the candles on yesterday’s mantel
I saw dissonant tracks from familiar houses
pass over green mounds I had not known
I saw entire histories brought to light
mothers and fathers my own amongst them
resurrected for a time in open fields
and in chasms borne away by river water
I saw them with the speech of their youth
as it was and their firm skin and wild hair flying
they stood beside bridges or by some stone wall
caught in the fair wind of days I had thought
were gone forever

while I was writing this
I tried to release myself
to escape the scope of memory
to deny the world as it is
not affirm its dismal presence
to avoid it or fill the void or at least
embrace its emptiness with my own

while I was writing
a plain line across the page
chained thought and word
condemned them to make sense
where none had ever been

© BH, 2018

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And writing, if not automatic, embraces unexpected intrusions. Rather like the way magma, welling up, metamorphoses the crust as it rises.

There’s that, perhaps, to dignify the process with a metaphysical-seeming sense. Then again, the process may simply be an escape: the writer running from an intolerable or incomprehensible world.

Meaning, august, metaphysical or otherwise is pure chance or an arrival on the page of unintended consequence.

You must decide…