A sudden flash of inspiration

Breakfast

His smile dangles
china thin -
a fishing line pulled taut
across the kitchen table.

His mood, precarious,
ebbs and flows all day,
determined by forces
outside of my control.

His tousled hair tells
a story of troubled sleep.
This morning he tells me
there are monsters in his bed.

But then his laughter bubbles up
to the surface of his lips
and spills into the air around us
like a wind chime during a storm.

Minutes later, a sudden silence
alerts us to the broken glass
of anger that threatens to penetrate
the skin and end the moment.

He is not fully awake.
Even under the best circumstances
his emotions run away with him.
He cannot comprehend his own desires.

He asks for water but won't
accept the cup when it is offered.
Instead he demands "bigger" water
in a different colored glass.

His soul is fervent,
so furiously independent,
so much force packed
into such a tiny frame.

He says his cereal is too hot
and smiles, as if he knows
it is not too early in the morning
for my impatience to awaken.

His expectations are bigger than me -
pushed forcefully to action
by a different current.

He swims upstream.

--April, Melissa

I remember when I was in college and a poem would come to me. I was writing all the time, mostly because I had the time and I lived and worked and breathed in an environment that churned up the desire to write and gave me plenty of subject-matter. And since I have a terrible short-term memory, I would have to drop everything, literally, and write down the line or the stanza, or the word...whatever it was that dropped into my brain without invitation. In fact, sitting on the curb on the way to class was where many of my favorite lines met paper for the first time.

Today, I almost had to pull over the car to get these lines down on a scrap of paper I found on the passenger side floor mat: His smile dangles china-thin / a fishing line pulled taut across the kitchen table...

What it became here...in its draft form...who knows if it will remain this way. It may change tomorrow. Lines may be dropped, added, moved...whole stanzas might morph...the whole thing might be scrapped...maybe a phrase or two will be salvaged and become the first lines of a story in 5 years.

That's the funny thing about writing. Just because it is written, doesn't mean it cannot be erased. Writing, though more physically permanent than speech, is more changeable. It can be revised, re-worked, re-written. I'm a fan of the ability to start over. A fresh, clean sheet of paper just waiting to be filled with ideas and thoughts.

Enough philosophy. It's time for bed. Tomorrow is a new page.

P.S. We finished the deck project today...put in the dirt and gravel to fill in the hole caused by shortening the deck a bit. I created a space for the tomato pots and bought two new azaleas (on sale at Sunny Farms), two new deck chairs (the comfy Adirondack style), and two African Blue basil plants for D. I also put my name on a list at The Greenhouse Nursery on S. Bagley for a lemon tree. Amazingly, those little buggars are only about $30...so I guess I'll will have to see how green my thumb is by trying to grow one in a pot on my porch. Tomorrow, it's off to Gross's Nursery to look at hanging baskets and daisies so I can finish my planting and get to sitting and enjoying.