ShySpark

I write because the very essence of my soul demands it.

Hearts are weak, soft, and are hurt easy,
They bleed, and then cease to exist.
The soul is liquid forever
Moving at its own pace through existence
Mingling with others, and then splitting apart
Tirelessly spilling into new territory
Fearlessly cutting the terrain beneath it into cracks,
Caverns,
And yes, even canyons.
The fluidity of it is perfection.
And there’s no need to lead the way, it knows.
So denying it what it demands is folly.

My heart feels and seeks after inspiration.
But words are the implements of my souls grand design…

***

For Ghosts and Onionskins…

I’m a tumblr, but I don’t follow anyone. It’s not really what I am here for. I do, however subscribe to a few rss feeds, of which yours is one. And quite frankly the only one I frequent that belongs to someone I don’t know.

But then I ask myself, don’t I? Don’t I know you, the one whose words always speak to me like a secret whispered between childhood friends? Even though I am well aware that I will never know the full, unabridged meaning of your words, I feel we are connected. Your poetry is a gift and somehow reading your words makes the fear I have of sharing my own melt away.

So I want to thank you for writing. From one moment to the next, from one poet to the next. Thank you.

These past few weeks we have had an unlimited supply of inspiration. It has been overflowing like a wish-pond that has had a million coins tossed in. What have we done with all this ripe, hanging fruit? Not much.

We have a few things well on their way to being plucked from that tree and served up to the almighty www by our lovely wife, but they are, at present, still just hanging there. We have some that are but flowers on the vine, not yet pollinated, and still others that are nothing more than dry seeds in a bin. It is our hope that someday, all these things will be good enough for the whole world to feast on.

So what is the nature of this post?

We are beating around the proverbial bush about that aren’t we?

*Nods head*

It’s actually a bit of a rant about public writing. Blogs, posts, tumbls, freshly-pressed articles, notes, on-line journals of any shape or size that can be found in the public domain. In essence, stuff like this. We follow a very short list of these on a regular basis ourselves and have noticed that some of these “blogs” have the feature of “password protection”. To this we say “WTF”.

We ask ourselves why this would be a thing people would do. Why write something, post-it publicly, and then make it private so no-one can read it? We have cycled through the possible reasons:

1. They don’t want someone to read it.

2. They don’t want to hurt someones feelings (see #1).

3. It’s offensive and might elicit retaliation (see #1).

4. It has to do with illegal behavior that might land them in jail (see #1).

5. It’s embarrassing (see #

*interrupts* OK, we get the idea, move on…

Right. So all reasons point back to “they don’t want someone to read it”. The question then becomes, why post it in the first place? It can’t be because they have no other place to blog, or write, or jot down a thought - those mediums are EVERYWHERE. If you have a computer (you are already blogging so the chances of this are, let’s say, pretty good), there is some app you can use to generate words and save them in a space that is not public.

Why post it? Why post it? WHY POST IT? Do you just want someone to know you are posting and then taunt them with the fact they can’t read it. Are all those password protected posts just one liners that say “ha, ha, nobody can read this, the joke is on them (with a tongue out smiley)”.

We have even thought of the fact that someone might have written something that they only want their three closest besties to read. To whit, we say, “FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS JUST EMAIL IT TO THEM”. If they really are besties, and you trust them like you trust yourself, they will protect whatever dirty-little-secret you want to hide from the rest of the world. If not, then your lack of judgement in other people is punishible by a public showing of whatever that blog might be.

That sounds harsh, but we never claimed to be anything but. In fact, at times we can be brutally honest and sometimes honesty hurts.

So if you are a freak, or are gonna freak, or just freaking crazy - We say let that freak-flag free! Post public un-password protected or get off the pot! Either that, or just give us the damn password already…

Shyspark Out!

… Well mostly.

A few days before this past weekend we hatched a new idea, a plan of sorts, in an attempt to bring us back from that “edge” that we were teetering on for a number of days. This detour away from the normal weekend routine was specifically designed to bring all things near and dear to our heart very close and put the troubles (or at least most of the troubles) of other people out of our minds.

To ensure success, we had a written list of rules to follow. Normally, we are not a big fan of rules, but in this case, they served as a gentle reminder of what we were to be focusing on so as not to be distracted by all the other things that try to invade our space and our mind.

We wont bore you with the details of the list, but can say in general terms it involved a lot of reading, writing, listening to music, riding the bike, and above all else, sitting around in our underwear whenever possible.

Admittedly, one can never shut out the entire world completely and there were some things that required our attention, but these things were not overwhelming and we managed them as best we could. Outside of that, we did not answer the phone if we did not want to, nor text, and even went so far as to decline invitations to social gatherings. We submerged ourselves in a world of fiction, transported our mind across the ocean, and even came up with a formula for getting the most out of life.

For the most part, the weekend was a great success, and the best measure of this is how we are feeling about it today. Rested, relaxed, and ready to face the world again…

Everyone in agreement say “I”.

“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”,“I”. *Smiling* Now that’s what I like to hear.

I know it feels like we went missing, but we’ve been here all along. We just haven’t had much to say lately. Life seems to have turned into a roller coaster of stuff that we apparently can’t string two legitimate sentences together to describe. Not that we haven’t tried, because we have, but the usual methods are just not working.

The new approach - to talk about all the other random stuff to fill the void, and hope that leads us back to a place where everything else will start to work again…

The time is now. Ready, set, GO!

We know what you are thinking. Well, that one over there doesn’t, but the rest of us do…

You had just found this new place to read about someone else’s stuff and it’s shiny, maybe even a little different, and you were just starting to get into it when “bam” out pops this little ditty of a poem. Just a wee-bit of a thing, but enough to make you go “whoa, what’s this now? I don’t DO poetry”.

Well, so you already knew that I fancy myself a writer, but now I have to come clean on where the heart of that passion lies. Which is in the poem. I could go on and on about it, telling you how cool it is and how all the lyrics to all the songs ever written were just poetry set to music. Defending it as one of the most under appreciated forms of writing. But I’m not going to do that, cuz you will probably just get bored and walk away (or hit the back button as it were).

I’m simply going to say this. Poetry is part of what defines me. It is just a fraction of the total package you get when you get me, and as such there will be a touch of that spilling out among the rest of what I’m rambling. I’m a big fan of the abcb style and though I pride myself on some of my longer, more complex pieces, sometimes short and sweet is where it’s at. Kinda like how a quickie can be really satisfying.

If this is deal-breaker for you, and you just can’t bear to stick around, I accept that. But I urge you not to jump off the bandwagon just yet, because there will be so much more you will miss if you do.

“That wasn’t what you were thinking? Well never mind then…”