Last Night’s Reading
I can hear the questions now:
“How do you feel
when he writes about you?”
“What do you think?”
The question of how
the listener feels doesn’t enter
the reader’s mind
when it imprisons
this furious god
who drives us onward.
We carry a picture within
our hearts that corresponds
to an internal reality
that has nothing to do
with the world around us.
At first, we impose.
Next, we learn to shape.
Then we realize we are the ones
who’ve been shaped
and we learn to share.
Only then do we understand
that what we carried within us
like the mother carries
a baby kangaroo in her pouch,
was not at all what we thought it was.
“Mankind can withstand
a small amount of truth,”
some poet wrote, Eliot, I think.
And what we release hops out,
floppy ears, long legs, bounding,
bonding with its own sweet music.
rogermoorepoet 
This is so true. Often people will ask me what does —-think of this, is it a portrait, and I think maybe I should tone it down, but is self censoring the answer. Not when I am writing but in the cold light is day?
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Clare refuses to come to any of my readings. That’s your life she says. Deal with it the way you want. But keep me out. That way, there’s no second guessing. I do love those kangaroos … is this what you meant? … if you say so, love!
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Very funny Roger, something indeed like kangaroos.
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Your work helps people, just like your editing. We’ve got a couple new ones buddy. Check out Lardy Arms and Queen Kong and I. Your feedback is always warned
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I’ll be there. Thanks for the compliment and thanks for visiting! Make it a great and creative new year!
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What we carry within us isn’t what we thought – I think it takes a very long time to comet that realization!
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Twenty-five years in this case, may be longer. I really reduced the original poem, pared it right down. It certainly sums up my own creative trajectory and I remember well “forcing words into meaning” instead of allowing them to flow and grow.
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That’s exactly what happens to me with poetry. Not so much the fiction. But poems have to pour out of you. I used to get caught up in having to rhyme everything too!
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You learn to write in rhyme, without thinking or straining, but only when you have used it enough to be confident with it. and not to have to ‘think’ about it. Forcing it is out: but that’s what we tend to do, especially early on. I often write rhyming poems and then break them up so the rhyme becomes internal or doesn’t show.
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Right, there’s a natural rhythm to it. And even if it doesn’t exactly ‘rhyme’ it ‘fits’ well in the verse!
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