Nascent rhymes and crossing out the wrong words
if you need someone to tell you
the sky’s not gonna’ fall;
if you need someone to sell you
on dreams you couldn’t draw;
if the hope that lies within you
(is) still waitin’ for the thaw,
take my hand now darlin’ – - I’ll show you what I saw…
It’s hard to imagine now that my first foray into online writing was basically just a way to push my half-baked poetry on anyone who happened to stumble on my personal webpage. Now I rarely write anything poetic at all—I don’t even get the urge all that much anymore. Well, except for times like the other night, when the lines at the start of this post kept pulsing through my brain. The only way to quiet it was to write them down. I haven’t actually tried to write anything remotely resembling a poem in quite a while. I used to make a routine of it, but then it started to feel too routine.
I remember when I was younger, say, seventeen or eighteen. I wrote a lot back then, but every once in a while I’d slow the pace. I would just get the feeling that I had nothing to write, and then I would spend a few days, weeks or months wondering if that was all I was ever going to want to write. But I always came back to the pen and paper (no keyboard and monitor in those days), whether it was a matter of hours or months in between.
And, as with most writing, a good majority of what I wrote was not fit for anyone else’s consumption. As one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes goes, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
I’ve long since migrated from the nervous world of a would-be (or wanna’-be) poet to the footloose, devil-may-care demeanor of the modern blogger. But the rhymes are still there for all to see at www.thesmedleylog.com/drafts. See, I even moved them from the old personal webspace to this domain? Apparently, I’m not yet embarrassed enough by them to delete them into oblivion.
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