Time to play - Poem by Ivan Donn Carswell

It is a pristine page, clean on the blue screen
where I compose, I don’t expect it to stay that way
as words glow from blunt, abused fingers, as insistent
sounds in my head translate into sentence structures,
as lips articulate the rhythms and the sounds of the
jumbled lexis as swiftly as I can unleash them. I couldn’t know
what might emerge tonight, I only knew the gripping tightness
in my mind and the pressure, the indecent urge to express
and let the dammed words flow.

It isn’t always this way, there are times when I know
within a line or two what I must write, like when some event
has incited raw passion or wrenched me from my feet
or I have staggered unbalanced from fright or fear, despairing
its sheer effrontery, beaten and contrite. But not tonight.
Tonight I am free to roam in the growing fields and taste
whatever delights are imagined, to follow the whim of the wind
and the random flights of thistledown inviting my errant
delinquency – to go with the flow.

If I had known poetry could do this for me I’d have
surrendered a long time ago, grown fat on the back
of my promised muse with hair sleek and long to the waist,
wearing kaftans with no shoes, speaking in tones.
As it goes I have time to play without haste the games
that engage me most, write when the urge makes havoc
with good intent, dispense with guilt-management and
stress, lend commonsense enough rope to tether itself
beyond hope of poetic redress.
© I.D. Carswell