Other Worlds They Have Not Lived
“Other Worlds They have not Lived”
Writers, and poets, just like musicians
feel they have the pulse of things,
it’s an arrogance that declares
I know, so much more than you,
I know of such things,
so much better than you.
I have lived more of a life,
I have a deeper capacity to feel.
The reader watches
the dance, and thinks -
no, no you don’t
know better than I,
nor would you
ever want to.
There is a lightness
in the limerick
a joie de vivre
innocent,
macabre or satire,
but underneath
the undertow
there rises more
mysterious darker things
that lift you up towards
some luminocity, even if
one exists stagnant
in the in-between -
their words like lines cast,
make your heart swell
and like an ocean they
pull you back in.
You'd gladly drown
in their verbosity.
To write the story
one must live,
to write the story
one must read,
to read,
one must concede,
there are other worlds
one has never lived,
nor will ever live.
(LadyLabyrinth / 2023)
“While he writes,
I feel
as if he
is drawing me;
or not drawing me,
drawing on me--
drawing on my skin--
not with the pencil he is using,
but with an old-fashioned goose pen,
and not with the quill end
but with the feather end.
As if hundreds of butterflies
have settled all over my face,
and are softly opening
and closing their wings.
But underneath
that is another feeling,
a feeling of being
wide-eyed awake
and watchful.
It's like being
wakened suddenly
in the middle of the night,
by a hand over your face,
and you sit up
with your heart going fast,
and no one is there.
And underneath that
is another feeling still,
a feeling
like being torn open;
not like a body of flesh,
it is not painful as such,
but like a peach;
and not even torn open,
but ripe and splitting open
of its own accord.
And inside the peach
there's a stone.”
("Alias Grace"/Margaret Atwood)
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