The dread of a writer’s block
(with tanka, a 5-line Japanese short poem also called song)
Amazing how crunched up the mind gets when on its own it churns up an ocean, an ocean of time, for me. I’ve never learned how to escape the undertow. Like now, I got only two weeks to clear up a week to be in Hawaii, yes, again! Why do you do it to yourself, a friend had asked yesterday, when on her ‘hi there’, I unleashed an anguished list of hurdles.
Why? I never did figure out since my school days. Maybe I dawdle longer than hunker down to tackle what awaits me. Maybe time sense in my brain has been weakly encrypted. Maybe pushing off the present to grapple a future has long been a habit…like instead of writing two more advanced columns here to free me up until the first week of November, I poured in two hours of haiku-combing to catch up on my responses to daily haiku prompts at the National Haiku Writing Month Facebook site, which I had joined three years ago. And I have yet to read through friends’ posts I’ve missed, or worse, responses to likes and comments.
weavers/
could we be? Or more/
of clam gatherers…/
who speak of tinted/
fabrics in moonlight/
My suitcase from trolling in the North East remains intact with scents, flavors, or maybe dried-up rain-and-dew drops, star-and-moon dust, or even thumb prints of luggage handlers and chocolate fingerprints of a child because I haven’t unpacked. Lists and more lists of what to fill it with for the next trip stare at me from a memo pad. And yet, here I am gripped in the undertow of receding waves to write this…and oh, wishing for more haiku or tanka as in:
if all the flow/
pour into my heart/
imagine me/
singing about what oceans/
know of starlight/
How do writers confront deadlines, really? I knew one in university days who chomped off leaves of books, not of lessons but of poetry he wanted to write. Another stared in class through blood-shot eyes the
veins of which he said throbbed with lines.
But performing artists take on stress, too, like in the weird body contortions as if the looming first bell for a symphony concert could be squeezed out of the young conductor’s body I once knew. One premier danseur would go in a cabinet-building or dismantling rage before say, a Swan Lake gala while his is prima ballerina I heard would search for old receipts, redoing budgets.
Why does a deadline sound like the approach of doomsday? Or like
rain shadows/
in shimmers our song/
flows away/
among anxious steps/
melting in runnels/
You make frequent trips to the fridge to look for what to cook, or suddenly take the broom and scour corners, chides a friend who knows me from university days. In those days, I had to refile my notes, take hours to file my nails and wash for the evening, and long minutes to choose which pajama to wear to study and I would obsess over slapping a nuisance-mosquito before I finally open a notebook to memorize from beginning page to end page for exams. Nothing to do with creativity or writing then but such habits could have marbled my bed of procrastination that now I slip into each time I try to meet a deadline.
loss/
to a flower…/
same as/
my anguish over time/
vanishing perhaps?/
And the dread of getting stuck on a line while time like a martinet stomps on, marching while a blank space stretches on to the horizon. I once took on “an answer-if-you-can challenge” in a writing blog on writer’s block with this fancy response:
“Stuck, I am often but not glued upside down on a ceiling though I had wished I were for years or with the kind of pain that would summon my whole being, overwhelmed but freed with screams if I have to, and whines or groans.”
But stuck on a blank page I always am, which exacts more than a body feat—much more than pain. Or these days—on a blank screen, where a cursor shredding the ‘now’, a pulse hacking at space even taunts me with a beat that rises in decibels until these march after me: scratch, bite, cry, or die, scratch, bite, cry, or die . . . and it begins again.
A wave of peace though slips in on rare moments, the kind that washes off the horror. This wave hums and murmurs mythic promises not unlike a phoenix, and indeed, out of the wave in the most ordinary way, I rise, unstuck. Yet, in truth, I am often stuck solid, dead-beat for no reason, beaten by the blankness, bushed. What I do then if I remember it—weave a cocoon made out of the last verses from the Canadian poet, Earle Birney’s ‘Bushed’ (1951):
‘…And now he could only/
bar himself in and wait/
for the great flint to come singing into his heart.’”
Still, while quite a flitting balm to my chronic fear of deadlines and blank pages, I do un-block myself with exactly the same dreadful lines that first scare me like with my first lines here.
Bones and me
my first (and all through succeeding issues)
*tomorrow still a house of knives
Bones, 1:1, December 2012
my last as Johannes S. H. Berg, editor announces a hiatus
Bones, #22, March 15, 2021
(2 monoku sequence)
slippery truths
1.
splattered “I” shards but tinnitus chatter said of slippery truths
what frayed tongues possibly wrangled off arid infinity
here begins the march of derelict seasons spewed off cavities
found rotting on verbose nouns a myth un-clutched off insensitive verbs
or could be the worn-out truth-chains distressed fingers unspooled
encrypted in leprous walls a logic of sorts possibly condensed droplets
no breath at all a weightless thud plying tin scraps of slippery truths
the broken humanoids’ lie divined as arterial glyphs lost on ears
p 6
Alegria Imperial
2.
the candle wick I pared to its root now a towering flame
but shredded in air a hissing ember vanishing on sacramental rims
with quivering night lamps a swarm of pulsing heat in my
sullen darkness /red shadows wakened in spurts the wavering breaths at vespers
on Fridays whispered agonies wet my beads of the 5th decade
a ruckus of nails scraping altar drips the heightened roil in my breast
from its pared root the candle wick erupts on geyser verbs
lapping up the darkness the frayed seams of my veil
p7
Alegria Imperial
(2 gembun)
a rift in beveled dusk
suddenly I recognize the color greige half grey half pallor
lunes I once lost now gelling as a cloud lolling with me
seeping off the rift in swaths
a faint mushroom sky my umbrella
p.8
waken mid-route
a raw chill stranded in the chiming wind moving with crows
my eyes sated on pockmarked clouds as if air
instead of marrow in my bones
I shift focus to the sea my prison
p9
Alegria Imperial
Bones #22 March 15, 2021
the wind
but the wind will come again…
…on altar walls blood-stained by stigmata on finger bones sticking out of grains on the wet scent of rosemary in an old man’s hand on palm fronds skinned for brooms
..on the sea scooped in a wife’s prayer seeking for a mask in blue whales supplications of dying roots the earth represses night eyes uncoiling vines on children’s cheeks
…in your hands a crosshatch of spider web sagged from the sun’s weight unrelenting darkness left for the lightning
on cracked cages
winded tongues
unleashed
the other bunny, January 28, 2019
a rift in beveled dusk
(a parallel in fours–to be read from left to right or by column from top to bottom)
a rift in beveled dusk
suddenly I recognize
the colour grieg
on wind slopes
half grey half pallor
lunes I once lost
now gelling as clouds
lolling with me in a puddle rim
seeping off the rift in swaths
my umbrella the faint mushroom sky
GLOOM
(one of my last poems at otata defunct since)
do foxes exist like we do?
thirst for what’s good like silence
sound fractures people’s heads
under cover of light
there’s iniquity dancing in the leaves
would fox howl if I whisper “I thirst for wind-drips”?
he draws his being up as if
there’s dawn in the guise of stalled words
digs the gloom
and cries leaving
purpled patches in my head
being there (a haibun)
being there…it is the rhythm that’s constant it seems and not the stillness—the way the wind pulls and withdraws and the way the leaves sway and retract or how the clouds gather into masses and then dissipate into air or is it merely the eye that misses the jagged movements and edges and catches merely that moment when the rhythm shows and reassures us as in the constancy of flowers even as petals begin to brown and curl in the edges and fall, stripping the branches of their name because all we recall is their being there as in moments we have flowed into still flow into like on our early morning walks when
shifting tides–
the river unloading burdens
for us to decode
LYNX XXVII:I February 2012
night fall (a sequence of one-line poems) and three single haiku at
Bones #21 Nov 15 2020
night fall (a sequence)
*
no one addresses darkness with due respect could be fear that pierces the eye
/
possibly only me in the bus siding with a squat ghost shushing roped shadows
/
window framed mindless leaves burst on a breeze-storm grazing dust-coated rails
/
up close whale clouds already crossing a night bridge day molting on a tail
/
screeched brakes a baby’s howl rips the scrim maybe hunger just imagined
/
roasted yam pressed garlic just guessing from the smell of a woman’s hair
/
scratching her ears probably over far off thoughts of an undressed chicken
/
no one senses but still night falls hip-swinging on a scatter of desiccated seeds
xxx
single haiku
monkfish
un-deboned bent
in adoration
*
tipped moon
in a saucer scanning
lost sonnets
word/s all I see in limbo
a sequence of one-line poems at:
http://bonesjournal.com/books/Alegria_Imperial-words-all-I-see-in-limbo.pdf
my 2nd eChapbook at Bones Library
the bee and the flower (a cherita)
the bee and the flower
(short story in verse)
dawn again and still walled-in
no matter… the sun invades my bareness
in the wrinkled shade
a ruckus of leaves
could it be the wind
riffling nests sagging
on a day just hatched?
then the stillness
swift wings…
on the edge of dreams
not a songbird but a bee
dark on my lids…
all I see as it circles
probing the scented air
then soft as breath
alights on a blossom
i blink
the bee sinks into
the flower’s pulsing center
like lips half-opened…
as petals strain to widen
and quiver on the beetle’s
deepening kisses
a colorless breeze pulls me back to the stillness
the blank walls of waiting
an ekphratic poem based
on a photo of a bee feasting on a dragon fruit flower lv 07/27/20 hh 07/27/20
((((*-*))))
5 one-line poems at UndertheBasho (UtB)
where creation begins and ends onion scales
smoke and grey hair grandfather’s syllables receding the hours
fraught trail the tightness of wild lace shadowless
unbecoming is the moon because of bruises?
shrunken between trumpeted lies and ripped drums the ageing boor
UndertheBasho one-line poem 2020 July 11
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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