Write (October)

October writes to advise you your connection with sleep is temporarily postponed. Your daily appointment with the unadorned facts is pencilled in, while your copious mental notes on the population in particular will need updating at the end of the day. Everyone’s a joker in the pack: nothing’s crossed out, just handfuls more footnotes to the body of knowledge. This month you will write yourself a letter reminding you it could be worse. Be nice to yourself and other nuances. Yours in good faith, &c. The keyboard is an option, though sleep again deletes randomly certain files so painstakingly saved.

Write

Libraries don’t mean to be overwhelmingly wordy.

They shelve up centuries of wise plans and absurd

When all we are wanting is the single right word.

Home shouldn’t hinder our green verbal inventions

But in the way’s the laundry, or that new extension.

We have to make friends with procrastination

As we waffle at parties about gloom and elation.

The great outdoors are barrier to being freed,

Cities a hundred distractions from our need.

We may shuttle round the Earth literally times

Missing what it is, and how, that rhymes.

Time to write about finding time to write.

Some prefer the evening, others like first light.

Vague silence follows as we sort out our thoughts.

Art is long in dressmaking but time wears shorts.

Just sitting does nothing, we need space and theme,

A favourite desk or turret, thereat to dream.

Write everything we want to say first, then edit.

It’s not for money when it works, nor the credit

But the livelong credibility of what we said.

Writ just for our own sake, may as well be dead.

Trust the rush when it happens, the gospel’s ‘little birdie’.