I write with the tips of my fingers, extended through each digit from crackling knuckle, out from the wrist and down from the elbow, the shoulder, the neck and then the rotting brain, the brain, the mysterious box of rain that I can’t explain further. The same as you write or anyone writes. Our ideas come from our minds, when it comes down to it, and I think our minds are a conglomeration of all the things we see in our day to day life, the things that move us and make us. We take these things we see, these things we hear and feel and sense in any way, process them, and use them to explain how the world works. Nothing profound here, I know.
And poetry is simply using language, our best source of communication so far, to explain how the world works in as simple a way as we know how. It doesn’t take a lot of words. Hosho McCreesh can pull as much truth out of a Japanese maple in his Psalms from the Badlands as most philosophers have wrung out of thousands of pages of digressions. None of us (I hope) really think we know exactly how things are, but we catch glimpses of the truth, and we share these bright flashes with others and put together the puzzle of reality. We form a more complete image as we gather the pieces. It is a grand thing, expansive and endless really, with bright and dark hours, high and low emotions, soft pretty nights and devastating beasts of mornings, and sometimes we can’t even tell which is which.
I mostly just gather what few pieces I can, shape them in what way feels right, and hope someone can fit them into places where they need them to fit. Including myself.
If not, writing poetry at least passes the time.
*****