Last week in Wednesday Writers we were workshopping some stellar pages that got us talking about well, what if this moment right now was an unfolding poem? In fact, what if life is always an unfolding poem that you can choose to live inside of anywhere, anytime? Like start seeing dolphins kind of thing.
And not just the big and small poetry moments that much poetry is made of like sunsets and sunrises and hellos and goodbyes and war and lost love and weddings and apple trees and seeds and seasons and babies being born and all the "big" scenic life things (not complaining) that beg to be drawn out and snapshot for the page, for eternity, saying look at me, see me, see this, witness this miracle (as they should!), but what if we stop right now and also see the unfolding poem in the mundane (fraught, bored, impatient, uncouth, etc) or even the un moment? Not just see, but immerse in, be a part of, be the poem itself unfolding?
This shopping trip to Trader Joes a few days before Thanksgiving, for example. All the chaos and commotion and passive aggression and blaring car horns in the impossibly small parking lot and people being their best and worst and conscientious selves and getting in your way and/or saying "go ahead" to avoid a head-on cart collision. And waiting in line forever and all this commotion swirling around one dude, the center of gravity, standing quietly zen like, bored to death still behind a pop-up display of pecan pie samples in those cute little white cups. And he's not getting much action (why not? saving up pie calories for Thanksgiving? What would others think? Well, I'm about to have dinner so...), but a few zealous takers who grab the cup and run (Oooh... yay! Pie! Pecan pie! My favorite! Sooo grateful for this! I better not...) with a chortle of gratitude (aren't we having fun? Oooh, I'm so bad, but let's not tell anyone: I won't if you won't ha ha ha ha ha) in attempts to (maybe?) justify their (shameful!) giving in to temptation and/or indulging a compulsion to people please in the perfunctory societal scripts in which we're all complicit... (ahem, what happened to that unfolding poem, Missy?) met with a blank stare by the dude at the display who could care less, I just want my however much it is per hour so I can go home, a TJ's teamship anomaly, if you ask me for isn't this The Love Boat, after all? Ahoy Matey! It's the Good Ship, Trader Joes! and why so glum dude? And it almost breaks your heart when some older guy, say 75 approaches the young glum bored display dude and says practically out of a movie, the old ones that still make me all kinds of nostalgic and incredulous (wait: life was like THAT?), he says "don't mind if I do!" and sweeps in with an elegance that is verging on extinct, which isn't what makes you sad so much as the dead air around him/them, that it goes unheard, that no one but me saw that and heard that, no one there to see this unfolding poem, accept his hand and waltz across the TJ's dance floor (isn't this... couldn't this also be a prom or a ball or..?), no one there to see and say back and match his old school joy for the simple things and my heartache turns to apathy and
this was certainly not what I intended to write, but I guess I got so inside the unfolding poem that I found something swelling, which is to say I guess it worked (for me!). That was fun!
And anyway: all of this is just to say what if everything right now, even this now, was a poem and you were a line in the poem and the poet or the person living inside the poem channeling it for all the rest to see?
Try it? :)
