[writing] It just Won't Go

Sometimes, when I am working on a poem, I know that it's not working, it will never work, and I'm better off just selling it off for parts to future poems. And sometimes, it's like another eye opens in my brain, and the poem comes through me, in a way reminiscent of how my creative writing professorat university told us never happens. It's not effortless, but it almost feels like it. Like one of those fast-forward nature films where the flower blooms in about three seconds. Like that.

And then, sometimes, writing a poem is more like banging your head against a wall. You know that the wall is just soft enough to let your head do some damage. You know that on the other side of the wall is a great poem. You're almost sure of that. It calls to you. You want it to be free. But in the meantime, the scalp wounds are starting to really become an issue.

Behold, my bricked-up darling:

Samson and Delilah

It is, perhaps, just another story
of the perfidy of women;
Samson, parted
from his glory by Delilah’s soft whispering pleas.
What could she have said to him to make him forgive
three previous attempts, the ropes she bound him with,
how each time she tried to make him
less than he was? He was not stupid,
he of the riddles, he of the clever uses for
jawbones and foxes, not too dull
to see what lay in her eyes when she smiled
and pouted. Three times he lied, and then
despite lurking brothers and attempted murder
gave up his secret.

Perhaps he knew
and did not care. Perhaps
that hour, shorn of his curls, hands and
arms and body no different than any man’s,
when she had taken his power
yet still held him in her lap, slender fingers
caressing his smooth nape and crown, perhaps
it was worth the price.
To be weak,
to be as another man.


One of an on-going series I'm doing about the Bible and how I feel about the stories in it, which is rarely how they said you should feel about them in Sunday School. And it Won't Go.

*shakes poem in classic bad-nanny fashion*

The rhythm is blah. I've messed with line breaks and with POV and beh. I know what I want to say here, and it has to do with men and women and how what goes on in a hetero relationship and they way that the Bible continually tells us these stories about people making choices and then later on some guy came along and modified all those choices to add "because women are trecherous!!!1! But I can't seem to make that clear. Or else I make it too clear. Nothing is working. Maybe it needs to go to the Home for Reluctant Poems (a folder labelled "needs work") and think about what it's done for a few months.