poetry on demand

I had a nice exchange last night with LB Wielenga, who did such an admirable job editing my 2005 release INVOCATO, regarding "writing on demand".

She hates it. I hate it, but I live with it. Because I find it is useful.

Every day, every hour, you build up thoughts, phrases, words and concepts in your psychological and emotional buffers, and even in the most frenzied writing spasm, you don't clear the buffers fully.

But, when compelled to write, say, when a patron or friend or lover (or, more importantly, a prospective lover) asks you to write for them, you can clear up a lot of that psychic driftwood by using it as building blocks.

To illustrate...I will now reach into my jacket pocket, where I keep my collection of random fortune cookie fortunes (I'm not kidding, I must have a dozen or so in there...it's an odd little quirk I have developed) and pull one out, and write an eight-line poem with standard meter and rhyme, based on the fortune I draw out.

Ready?

"Turn your scars into stars." Lottery numbers 12,38, 46, 5, 28, 3
(I could use the flip side which teaches me how to say "Birthday" in Chinese: "Sheng-dan-jie")

Wow, almost too easy...glad I didn't pull out "You will find money on the sidewalk today".

Okay, here we go...

scars into stars

The wounds are bound and seal and heal.
We wage the wars to find our peace.
The truth we find we can't conceal
and yet we sweat from pain's release.

Our scars are stars that light the night,
they give us hope through lessons learned.
Constellations of our fight,
life's truths we find in brandings burned.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Ahhh....that's better. Yeah, I know, no THE PATCHWORK SKIRT OF MY LOVE, but it passes. Although I do play a bit too much with the internal rhyme and the metric inversions in lines 6 and 8...of course, once 6 was stet, I had little choice to not mess up the pattern.

Nonetheless.