Poetry Unbidden
Added 2024-01-16 02:09:34 +0000 UTCThis is a gorgeous poem by Nick Vittum--one of the best I've ever read about writing. (Posted with permission.)
I used to think the most romantic possible
was to sit up through the dead of night
a typewriter pounding
drink and ashtray at the side.
I didn't smoke and I
hardly drank. I'd never
make a novelist at that rate,
but— poetry, at least?
Poetry came and poetry went
a novel too
unread, unloved, romance a charred ember
scorched earth policy
prevailed until
until the till
ran empty.
Nights now I crave that which
I was so eager to squander I
ride the surf with my brain’s flotsam
yearning immersion in the poetry
of sleep
Some neurosurgeon once
proposed that the mind lives
outside the body, or contains it
a porous and misshapen envelope
the brain the interface
the receiver and transmitter
from body to mind
My brain is broken. the poetry
of sleep transmits only
as static the occasional fractured
image the shard
of thought.
A poet without dreams
is a crippled relic
of what was or ought
to have been
until perhaps sleep at last
pervades the brain and
everything is poetry
unbidden
