I found this just now trying to find the last few lines of a poem I began writing a few days ago. An attempt at free verse, essentially, at telling a story in this form as much with the intention of finishing something by not getting bogged down in extraneous detail as anything else. Like much apprentice work, this is truly cringe-inducing, but it is a snapshot of a time, and a desperation. A desperation of not being able to write, and a desperation at not being able to live.
This was addressed to a woman at work who showed me some affection. Someone who had lent me an ear when I needed it and made me feel human. It had been intoxicating. This poem was written before we had an affair. I remember nothing about writing it but it is probably as close to automatic writing as I get, and so it is as true as it is poetically shoddy. It is also incomplete, of course. The central metaphor is robbed from a very famous poem I have read a couple of times but could not track down, a poem which features a man rowing to meet his lover and scratch against her window.
I’m climbing up the walls
I don’t know who I am at all
But with you
When life pares down
And smiles break out as sure as wars in oil-rich failed states
And anarchy is order once more
And the natural order is love’s, not hate’s
So how can it be I see you so rare
Sit and twitch and never scratch the only itch
That could see me get more than I bargained for
Your less-is-more is such a moreish binge
Yet never do I plunge my bow into your shore
For fear, despite solicitous gestures that I might impinge
On a life full of love, and love’s proper pith,
The kith and kin, generously seasoned with
A bouquet garnet of Venial sin
A life of letting all and sundry in
Of never letting sadness win
The most trivial of battles.
That tap on your window pane
A metronome din in my brain
March on, pace, refrain
I imprison myself to a legato [] of whims
A discordant symphony of moribundant arts
Each of them less than the sum of their parts
Ants crawl over my skin carrying remnants of the new leaves I’ve turned in
And so I climb the walls
And though I know the thought of that appalls
Your optimistic sense of right
With so many fairies all in flight
[] to address my plight
As every newest impulse stalls
Spare a thought
To my credit I knew as I was writing it that it was a shambles as far as form goes. I was aiming for lubricating the poetic urge rather than anything else, getting my inhibitions out of the way. And so where rhyme seems to come, I let it, and where free verse did so I let it, even though I know that mixing the two within the same poem, when it is not done very well, is a mess.