I keep thinking I need to write more. I keep wanting to write more. But I don’t. Dozens of quick ideas float into and out of my head every day, but I don’t get them out of my head and into the blog. Perhaps I need to do just one-liners until something real pops out.

I’ve been working on a post about Beethoven’s symphonies, but it’s hard to put into words. Maybe this week.

In the meantime, I just came across this poem hidden away on my computer. Weirdly enough, I remembered it earlier in the week and was wondering where I had stashed it. I wrote it when Garrison Keillor had a sonnet contest, and then promptly forgot about it. It was in a program called WriteRoom, a fabulous little program that I used for a while when I had to write without distractions, the purpose of which was to completely blank out your screen with the page. Just you and the words.

And then today I was showing Summer Miller all the little writing programs I had littering my hard drive, and when I opened WriteRoom, up popped all these little notes I had completely forgotten about, including the poem.

So, until I write something real, here’s a poem:

My back yard. Night. The vernal equinox.
We sit, all men, around a fire of oak
and last year’s Christmas tree. Our talk unlocks
our thoughts, and musings sift through light and smoke.
We drink. We talk: our lives, and what’s to do.
We talk of art and music, God and cause.
Someone’s removed his shirt. Now I have too.
I don’t know why this comforts, but it does,
to sit bare-chested, flesh exposed like mind
around the crackling light. Another drink,
I want to know if all these thoughts behind
these other chests can make me see, not think.
These men I love, and more than that, require:
we slowly start to move around the fire.

The last two lines should be indented, of course, but html prevents that.