Writing A Poem On A Frigid Spring Morning

My Inkwell pen struggles to form a beginning,

Creating streaks and blots on the journal paper.

Black holes where my words seem to go,

A mild case of writer’s block.

The cold air thrashes against my skin

Creeping its way through the cracked window.

With each new gust against the stained glass the draft

Filled with frozen air startles me into a strange calm.

I am to write a poem, a poem that has meaning,

But don’t all poems have meaning?

Should I be writing about Death, Birth, Rebirth?

There are no instructions to follow yet it feels like there should be.

Isn’t the way the raindrops slide down the tulip’s petals like a steady stream

Trickling down a gentle slope good enough? Who decides what goes into a poem

Anyway? Probably the little devil on your shoulder.

Aren’t poems all written for a specific purpose, to entice and hypnotize?

I want my reader to feel something, a surge of uncomfortable emotion.

I want to have the words twirl amongst the page

Creating a song that plays endlessly inside the reader

A secret shared only between my reader and me.

I want the stars to dance and the crickets to sing

A harmony for the bookworm and I in the bayou,

A cast-iron pot filled with a unique Jambalaya

Loaded with spice and subtly, but also surprise.

We treat poems as if they are a privilege,

A “fancy ode or what not,”

For the “ritzy people that sip rich wine at snazzy clubs.”

At least that’s what they say.

If poems are so ‘fancy’ then how come a “low-class” woman

Like me finds her footing in the enjambment and her

Breath in the perfection of iambic pentameter?

My hand, a sculptor of rhyme and rhythm.

They are not incantations performed by Wiccans,

Descendants of Salem that yearn to seduce the mind

Nor prayers performed by devout followers,

Nor summonings for lost souls to resurface.

Poems question every fiber of our being,

Each meaning of our existence in this bleak world.

My Inkwell pen halts, for I have found my poem

And once again that little devil has won.