Random discipline

I am a painful Picasso when it comes to writing poetry. My "blue period" included such titles as Bad Burton and Chasing Butterflies. My abuse of rhyme and meter should have been tried as criminal.

“call it fate, but I thought it seemed right,
to see a butterfly there in the morning light…”

Bad poetry aside, I try to write a little bit every day. Sometimes I publish it here, and sometimes I do not. I don’t know what this ritual accomplishes other than to discipline my brain to convert thoughts to words through my fingers.

So here goes random discipline:

Every few days I am stirred by something that happens in the universe. Usually it is subtle—the way something looks or smells and releases a fragment of memory or a phrase that marches out of context through my head until I recognize that it needs to be heard.

I saw a "house-biter" destroying a little house to make way for a mansion. The jaws clamped over the roof and crumbled the walls that once held the hopes and sorrows of a family. And, I wrote and wrote and wrote about the old giving way to the new. The cycles of life.

Sausage McMuffins inspired another piece about my mother watching me eat the popular breakfast sandwich and remarking: "I am glad you can enjoy swine's flesh." It prompted me to remember the Hebrew dietary laws that governed the food on the table of childhood even though we were not Jewish. And, the oh, so funny story of how a friend of ours, who discovered that he and his sister were eating bacon, yelled "Spit it out Lisa! It's pig meat."

Once I wrote a whole short story based on the phrase: "It was a road that would have been better left untraveled." Of course, I found out in short order that my spell check didn't think that UNTRAVELED is a word. It wanted me to use the word UNRAVELED. And, unraveled might also have been an appropriate use.

It was a road better left unraveled, but I didn’t know that until I was half way down it.

The road less raveled. The road less graveled. The road less traveled.

Writing. I do love words and good writing. I don’t know how to tell you what good writing is, but I know it when I read it. It is not cluttery. It doesn’t have too many images. And, it should make me see and feel what is beneath the words.

I have come to favor incomplete sentences when used for emphasis. I rather like the idea of breaking the traditional rules of writing. I still feel rebellious when I start a sentence with AND or BUT. I follow the AP stylebook's rules for commas. Writing should just flow and the need for a comma will be apparent. I like a metaphor that adds to my understanding. A metaphor that sits in the middle of the page clipping its literary toenails...well...it isn't so useful.

There is nothing disciplined about this writing and it took me less than five minutes. Will I use this? No. Maybe. Okay. I will.