Suggestive

I've been giving some more thought to the Bemsha Swing/Jonathan Mayhew angles of approach—particularly the idea of suggesting instead of telling or even showing. I love that! I think that I probably almost never get there in my own work.

And I realized that as I'm working on this narrative, made-up-myth series, I'm spending even more images telling. It's a story. At five in the morning, when all I could find to write on was an old pizza take-out menu (why did I have a pizza take-out menu in my nightstand?), my rambling musing led me to this muse:

My secret fiction writer lives
in a shoebox under my bed. Instead
of a decoder ring or a slim self-help volume,
I have this muse I seldom use.
And she is crafty, revising
her cardboard home with silks
and stories, then sneaking into my dreams.
She wants more, wants to stir a plot,
tell all, find out how it ends.

And then:

A poem is the death of sleep—
each image dragging me toward morning,
the futile repetition of each line
building into the next,
as though I could save them
until I found a pen.