Two sides of poetry

This is not the full poetry blog I have been promising, but that will come soon. For now, here are two poems I wrote recently. As with all my poetry, this is first-draft stuff, and I’m not sure either are publishable. They do highlight the two sides to my work, however: the cerebral and the emotional. Still not very comfortable putting poetry up, but here goes.

Some day I shall be able to work in strict form, but that is not this day.

On Verse

14/03/12

“emotion recollected in tranquility” – Wordsworth

Real life is not like verse.

Verse has structure, form, order.

If Eliot communicated anything

It is that real life can not be encapsulated

Can not be reduced

Into stanzas and couplets

Rhymes and assonance and

A slim volume on a library’s shelf.

However

Verse is not like real life, it needn’t be.

Verse is what you use, a tool,

When the night draws in

Or the heart has come to rest

To make thoughts trickle down a pen

Die on a page in a pad

Ready to be read

To make real life real.

***

Written After a Period of Convalescence

31/03/12

I want:

          the reckless abandon

          the rush of hormones and fear

          the joy, the sting-

I want it again:

          no longer numb

          still searching, still searching

          and old love lingers within-

But I want it again:

          that rush, that joy

          that reckless abandon-

                    Let me fall.

                    Let me fall.

                    Let me fall.