I've actually been writing a bit.  Evey now and then, someone will say something to me to get me going.  All I have to do is figure out how to sustain that.  Oh well.  Anyway, I mentioned in my last post that my friend was more interested in the words, and not so much interested in the message.  I've been thinking about that a lot.  I want to do both.  The question is, how important is that?  Is anyone interested in a message?  Do poems HAVE to mean something?  I don't think so.  The problem is, if they don't mean anything, they should be an experience in themselves, and that's hard to do.  I read a quotation by Picasso, and it hit home.  He said,

"Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only an insignificant part of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world though we can't explain them; people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."
-- Picasso

I copied that from a Youtube post, and thought it was relevant.  Should we just shoot for the sound of the poem?  The sense of it?  Maybe if I understood art more I would be better at it?  Maybe if I understood art less I would be better at it?  I don't know.  Recently, someone posted a tribute to Leonard Cohen on Facebook.  In it, he was giving a speech on how he did what he did.  He basically said that everything he did sprang from six chords.  I cross-posted it on Gabrielle Calvocoressi's  page and asked if we had those six chords in us. She's a working poet who is scrambling like most working poets to stay alive while writing poetry.  She hasn't answered yet, and I'm not expecting an answer.  I put it there because she has thousands of friends, and I wanted them to be thinking about it.

I flipped back and forth on this one.  In one, I did the message thing, with an emphasis on the meaning.

A Ball of Yarn

Different roads like a ball of yarn
  all going around the center
So many strands
  going round and round
All connected
  One beginning, one end
One ball of yarn

c. 2012 C. Thames

In the next, I was reacting to the idea of linear progression.  I tend to do that.  I think it comes from a background as a short story writer.  I was actually writing poems before I wrote short stories, but it was ingrained into me that a short story much have a linear progression.  The guiding words are, "What happened next?" in a short story.  I reacted to that.  The result was interesting, at least to me.

Logical Progression

A can lead to B
  sunlight on a lake
Never ending ending
  that continues
    forever
Senses challenged
  by what is not there
serendipity
The wind in the trees
  not reaching my face
Sunlit midnight
  rain dripping from my mind
drop  drop  drop
lifening the grass
  lifting the life
holding down the fears
   for poor A


c. 2012 C. Thames

The first time I wrote that one, I wrote "lifting the grass" but when I transcribed it onto the computer, I did a typo, and found out that I liked it better the way it is here.  I like the idea of lifening.  I wrote a couple more, but they're going to have to wait until next post.  Enjoy.