poems – three good words

Every year
the drama begins
sitting around the table
eating drinking
making merry
singing carols and songs wassailing

And then it happens,
right among the joyous crowd
that one little word
that one precious tone
eyes wide, pursed lips
a silence full ‘Oh-oh’ and ‘Here we go’
Oh God did you have to start that now?’

And the mayhem begins
the rants, arguments
and loud angry shouts
Uncle George, please
Aunt Jemma, why? Granma!
and Tammy, hold your tongue
Lucas, stop egging him on
but Ian and Joyce pour more oil into the fire
Eddie and Sara smiling sadly, looking on,
it’s all so predictable like that 12 days song

That one little look
that one small word
a sigh, a warning
sent out with serious eyes
‘Please, have another drink’
‘No, that’s what started it!’
The wine, the grog
those glasses of homemade eggnog
all of them pistol-shots to
The He said She said Marathon:

‘I never said’, ‘You did say’
This, that and remember that day
two, three, ten years ago
‘When I was a kid’
and everyone groans,
sighs, heads shaking, while eyes are rolled

Every single year, back when we played in the snow,
Every single Christmas that comes and goes.

A blank page can be an awful thing. It seems empty, but it isn’t. It’s filled with possibilities, words written, deleted, rewritten, crossed out, thought over, emphasised, loved, hated, wanted, reviled – and it never ends either.

I think the hardest part is to not listen. You know, those ‘Are you serious’ ‘Are you sure about this?’ ‘Is that good enough?’ and ‘Is that it?’ that whisper from the blankness of the page, sounding out the words in your head. And then it happens, the whispers grow louder and louder, talk, yell, shout and scream and suddenly you’re saying: ‘No no no no no no no no!’ It’s wrong! bad! awful! horrible! blergh!

Delete. Delete. Delete.

And then you’re back to square one, that blank page, that empty space that somehow is already filled with all the things you don’t want to say, all the things you wish to convey, and really need to get on the page. And the whispers just won’t go away.

So many times, too many times, listening has made me do something stupid – that is, I deleted everything in sudden horrified shame, which also meant all the words were gone, never to be retrieved, never to be seen again.

I stopped that.

I keep everything that makes me hesitate, sometimes even squirm, even the silliest scraps of words on paper. I keep them for one reason: between those words, hidden among the letters, there is usually something real, a thought, a word, a memory that I can use later when I know what it is that I’m after. It’s not always like that. Sometimes what I wrote is just really, really bad.

It’s sieving through the whispers and finding my inner compass that’s so difficult. The whispers like to override that gut-feeling that 9 times out of 10 is accurate, and even the tenth time it was right somehow. The whispers that seem to come out of the emptiness, they can get too loud, and the trick is not easy but possible: just don’t listen. Write it down. Write it all down. Even that sentence you know is silly. Even that word you just don’t want to use. Write it down. See it written out so that you know why it’s so horrible. It’s helped me countless times. In a way, when I see it written out, I finally know what’s so wrong with it. Until then it’s just words swirling in my head.

Then I let it rest for a while. Sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, it can go into months and years actually, but eventually I go back, and read everything one more time. It surprises me time and again how different the words look and sound just becomes some time passed. If I’m happy with it, I edit what needs editing, re-write, re-draft and re-do until it’s roughly where I wanted to be. Then I start over until I finally feel ‘Yeah… that’s about right.’ This takes time of course, and it can be (very) frustrating, but what really helps me is reading the books, poems and short stories I love best. They’re the proof that someone successfully managed to silence the whispers coming out of the (apparent) emptiness.

At one point I had something of a database of crap sentences, horrible plot twists, stupid little dialogues I wanted to turn into genuine conversations and failed, failed, failed. I keep them though, and go back to them when I can overcome the inner cringe, and sometimes – I can’t tell you how or why, there is a mystery to this craft of ours – I find that seed of thought, of feeling that I was aiming for and work from there.