You know how it is, you have an idea, you can see it in your head, but somewhere along the way it sort of evaporates. You try to reconstruct it, approximate it, dance around it, but no matter. The words scamper away like mischievous children deliberately hiding when you call them in for bath time. So then you fall back on the old stand-by, the idea about the idea that got away, the story about the story.
Hey, at least it isn’t one of those “And then I woke up” numbers.
i’m at a loss for words today
or what I mean to say
is that the words i’d hope to use
have simply run away!i put up signs all over town
and offered a reward
of every punctuation mark
if all my words are foundi’m really feeling quite distraught
I know it’s all my fault
so busy laying tracks of verse
I lost my train of thoughtthey shouldn’t be too hard to find
they don’t blend in so well
selected to stand out in crowds
exceptionally combineda few of them inspire awe
and none of them made up
I even had a rhyme for orange
so simple you’d guffawclearly from this poem you see
none of those words are here
so if you find my words then please
return my words to me
We’ll see if I can pull those elusive words together by next week. Poetry Friday, it’s a thing. Check out what others are up to over at Read Write Believe hosted by Sara Lewis Holmes who, I’m glad to see, is returning to the blog after a peripatetic summer. Go there, check out the other poems, see the world.
Fabulously fun. :) Thanks for sharing! (I especially love the word GUFFAW) :)
i’m glad, because chortle and snort were contenders for a spell…
“busy laying tracks of verse”
Yeah, I’ll *keep* those words, thank you very much.
wait, does this mean you found my words?
Oh, yes, it happens to me all the time! I had a student tell me this week that he was disappointed because the poem he wrote wasn’t as good as the one he had imagined. I told him that I knew exactly what he meant, and that he still couldn’t give up. Thanks for sharing this fun poem!
the only things worse than bad writing is not writing, by a factor of ten. some days its just a trudge through the fudge.
sending you moonshine letters and tracks of verse and lines of prose in star-filled envelopes right about now – catch them before they fall. ;) thank you for sharing this.
do i use a net, buckets, or just run around with my mouth agape and let them roll down my throat as they fall?