Ut pictura poesis

As is painting, so is poetry . . . .

I am not a poet, in that I am not committed to the art enough to claim that title. But I do, as many do but few will admit, write poetry.

I love the way unformed thoughts morph and dance and slither into shape-shifting forms when the words are really zinging. I like that I can sometimes discover what I am really thinking when I try to express it in poetry. Writing "poetically" allows me to maintain a distance from my thoughts - disown them for long enough that they no longer frighten me. And it allows interpretation, which gives one an "out" both to self and others, as to what one really means. Paradoxically poetry allows the writer to be both brutally and painfully honest, yet objective; to be emotional and psychologically intense but to see it as an observer.

I took a class that included training on what the authors called "propriocentric writing". This is writing that is deliberately self-aware by forcing one to ask the question, "what do I mean by that?". Poetry is the ultimate in propriocentric writing - except . . . when it is not. It is as crystaline and undefined as a snowflake melting in the palm of one's hand.

I am a still reflecting pool of water - Come

See your own image upon my quicksilver self.

An unbroken surface suggests stagnant serenity

Not birthwaters pulsating within an earthen womb.

Cool waters harbour warm pockets within which some bask,

And buoyed, they find a cleansing care within my flow.

I lap the shores with gentle grace - unless

With fury upon the wave, flotsam churns from the deep.

For their are Depths, murky, veiled opaque -

Masking Something - an unknown, not necessarily to be feared.

Sun pierce, Wind stir! But break my surface

Stir my watery soul to its wildest realm, its darkest depths

Unmask me, make me known.