How to write

A poem for one lost

Begin looking.
Begin to feel 
the cold 
the flush
red 
under cheeks, 
the dry skin peeling on your lips, 
green grass growing imperiously 
between 
white flakes. 

You must maintain vigor when others sleep. You must watch from the side with your notebook, staying in the moment; you must know the right moment to give into fantasy, and the right moment to stay with the real.

Can you hear the divine speak through you, the murmurs in a crowd?
You must feel the stick creak beneath the wheel,
tremble with a squirrel in its den.

You must hold on lightly without clenching you must not run from your eye floaters, 
but follow their meandering dance, til you understand they are fairies. Let them carry you away, blackberries on dead wheat, flat fields, man-made, so that the wind bites.
 
You must feel the pains of friendships lost til they gnaw at your bones, as if they were frost. 
All of this you must observe without judgment, 
your identity gone. You can’t even call yourself writer,
not if you want to write
for you don’t exist anymore
a whisper behind 
a screen, a broken pencil tip
rolled under a desk. 

You must do this when you are hungry. 
You must do this when you are cold; 
you must do this when you are tired.
And go and live and breathe and laugh and cry and wash your clothes. 
And you must grow old. 

Get it on my desk by five. 

Photo by Marcel Knufper