Now Playing: The Game, Queen. The whole thing.
(Not playing games. Just the album.)

Tonight I was going to rest.
I already had a blog post lined up for tomorrow: neat, tidy, ready.
You’ll see that one tomorrow, because it’s already scheduled.

But something happened tonight.

I sat at my computer, feeling aimless, and next thing I knew, I had written five poems. Just because something cracked open, and there they were, all waiting inside me.

As it sometimes does, it took absolutely drowning my thoughts in music.
Tonight: Queen.

I wrote without asking what I was writing. No doubt, no censoring.
Just out out out, winged snake, winged words.

Sometimes I need complete silence to write.
But, as I said, not tonight.

Tonight the neighbors had a bonfire, lovely to watch, but so pungent I had to close the windows.

The streaked windows that I had attempted to clean earlier today to see the poems better.
The lights came on earlier than I expected.
Darkness fell in ten minutes.

One of the poems had such a hold on me I felt nauseous afterward, nauseous and tearful in the best/worst way.

I love and hate that feeling: when a poem wrings you out and hands you back to yourself slightly disassembled.

And you ask, how did that ever fit inside me?

It wasn’t as bad as Holy Floaties, but it surprised me.
Discomfited me.

I grabbed my nearest comfort object, a little rock with a bluebird screened on it, because my other rocks were too far away. I squeezed it between stanzas.

I know that sounds dramatic, Herbert! But it’s true.

(Listening to STP now. At an unsuitable volume. But I don’t think anyone will complain. I don’t much care if they do.)

You know the drill. I only share the newly arrived poems’ titles:

• First, a Fist
  
• Boomerang
  
• Except You
  
• Sacred in Silence
  
• Listening to Queen Together, Maybe
  

A couple of them are, forgive me, ars poetica.
I didn’t mean for them to be, but it all gets tangled up. And there they are.

Sometimes I get scared when I think the muse has left me.
I hadn’t written in a couple of days, and it felt like abandonment, even though I know better.

But I let that restlessness drive me to the page.
And though I think I’m fine, like: it’s fine, I’m fine, really, but then it comes leaking out.

A night like this reminds me: the muse isn’t gone.
It just steps out of view now and then.

It waits to see if I’ll show up anyway.

I do show up. I always do.

I always will.

The poems always come back.
The muse is mine.

Or am I the muse’s? 

It’s kind of one and the same,

Isn’t it?