Every Word I Write

The man, behind the podium, standing tall, accepting responsibility for his actions, facing the consequences. The press expressing their dismay at the betrayal of good family values for which he (for which any campaigning politician) claimed he stood.
Beside him, a woman - his wife. More betrayed than the public that would like to think he’s theirs. Stunned. Wondering, perhaps, whether this show of solidarity is a front. If (how?) you will forgive him, or if the divorce papers are now a matter of course. Dirty laundry you didn’t realize you had hits front pages and you’re paralyzed.
And in the meantime, you hold onto appearances and you hold onto his hand, not sure if you want to let it go.

In the graying evening at first it seems
an unusual vanity piece, perhaps an angel
who coaxes the skeletons back into women
with her big beautiful curves -
but no, its skin is maple and spruce
and its heartwood bow is silenced.

I have no idea what this poem is about.

Heart-crenching. It can be a narrow line, the evoking of emotions in readers. Dare one put truth into a poem? (Dare one not?) It took me years of couching everything I wrote in alternate point-of-views before I discovered ways of writing how I, me, how I feel. I can't remember the word now. It implies fanciful, light-hearted. A trope. A synapse. A way of channeling through something else (but at least not someone, at least I can let the one who speaks for me be myself). Ah! The term is a conceit - from the Italian for "concept", nothing to do with pride.
But there is something beautiful, still, in writing from his point of view. (...I meant to put "another's" there. Never mind; it is true.) In writing a love poem as if one were the loved. Of, instead of eulogizing about his tenderness or caring, simply letting him show them.
Writing my love poems from the inside out.

Don't all girls think about that sort of thing? he asked me when I reported that our sisters have decided they're wearing orange dresses to our wedding (for mine's school, for his's football team). My mother added to this that she plans to wear the dress she wore to my Bat Mitzvah.
Don't all girls plan out their weddings? my boyfriend asked me.
The answer is: No, not really. It is short-distance I dream about, not marriage; that can come later. For a while I was speculating on life in Sheffield but am now contemplating our flat in London. In generic terms, though I may have daydreamed of a few scenes there and have a vague layout in my head. We're always back in Leeds, though, when he proposes - that I do imagine: it's always at the dog fountain.
Don't worry, I have no names for children picked out - an image or two, essentially plagiarized from your baby photos. I would like your last name after mine, but it is not this I dream of.
No, I dream of coming home to you every night.

I must confess I do not understand your sort of love. You bemoan the existence of girlfriends of attractive guys, though you say you're in love. You argue with him all the time in the other room and I try to put music on or pretend I don't hear. You tried to leave him last year but say you couldn't: why not? You daydream about other men, you're with him out of habit. When I asked how things went between you two over break, you answered with pleased surprise that you'd not been annoyed with him for almost two weeks. That is love?
Or yours. You envy us, you half wish for your own, you nurse a few little crushes. Is love a thing to be desired for itself? Surely it is but the ends to a means, what happens after a while when you meet someone who always but always makes you happy. It's incidental, a by-product. Love only holds meaning when there is a loved.

Green and white (make light green?). Campus colours in multiple ways. The Green is white, turning black at its edges. In case you want to track the pollution.... Two colours associated with freshness, newness - perhaps of very different kinds though, white's sterile and pure, green fertility. Colour associations: how dull a thing to write about. This pencil has no eraser [nor an ability to make paragraphs, evidently!], a good thing since I want to fill these pages with my nonsenses....

These are long, long days. I don't know whether I can work hard and play hard, that great slogan of the [my university] student. This Saturday I may not go to my house's biggest event of the term...I need more than one day when I have freedom about its length.... Right now a lot is being asked of me and I feel like the things that are most important to me are losing out - just as (I read once) when we are busy, we first sacrifice relaxation, which we need most.... By "things" I suppose I mean person - though time to myself, time to read, time for creativity are all being underserved.

I will do my best, for all of you. But I am not sure how good it will be.

They’re little pages, think they’re older than we [meant “they”] are, as we all do. When I was younger I thought I had been born in 1888: I knew there were a lot of 8s in it.
I prefer to handwrite this than to type it, I’m not sure why. I think I may be more censored onscreen, more apt to play with fonts, more interested in how it looks and feels printed than how it reads. Not that I don’t also just like the look of my own handwriting.
Five minutes is long and short. Time is so subjective. Although isn’t everything, time just more identifiably so? What if it didn’t fly or crawl or get killed or wasted (time on marijuana—what would that be like? High, peaced-out, laid-back. I should check my abnormal psych book. A cigarette, five-fingered, smelling pleasantly herby. Fumes. Time inhales. Does it breathe? If it can be killed, mustn’t it live?)

Fill the pages, they tell me, keep writing till the words run out but even then don’t stop. Plumb, no reach, search, explore, go a-caverning into yourself, mining words, places, people, poems you’ve forgotten. Your roommate clears her throat: inspiration enough for a tangent. Textbooks unread in the background like the cave dust that settles over the treasures you’re looking for (how cliché I’m getting!)—hiding, hidden treasures. Words or pasts actively hiding. What from? This being a Freudian journal, I should say perhaps the conscious, but again, cliché. No, these are not secrets you bury, dirty unvoiceable embarrassments. They are hidden not to protect you from them but them from you. The categorizing and reducting [misspelling deliberate] we do of our memories, the distortions we make, carving gemstones where none wished to be. Graphite interrupted.

Dressed in palest sepia is a woman
tenderly evocative of herself,
and to this tune she sets a piano,
lilting soft chords that undo her,
as if at last. The deep bass drum
of her solid refusal of such an altar
is washed over by right-hand arpeggios.
She tries to strike a jarring litany,
a rhythmless recital of rights and wrongs,
but the pianist simply smiles
and plays on and off her tears.

most of this is friends-locked, and my other journal is its only friend.

The exception is my recent free-writings: five minutes, pencil and paper, no eraser, go.

Ask nicely, and I'll think about letting you in to the rest, but for now this is really just something for myself.

by Norman Cameron

All day my sheep have mingled with yours. They strayed
Into your valley seeking a change of ground.
Held and bemused with what they and I had found,
Pastures and wonders, heedlessly I delayed.

Now it is late. The tracks leading home are steep,
The stars and landmarks in your country are strange.
How can I take my sheep back over the range?
Shepherdess, show me now where I may sleep.