The Drowning Gull 1 | Page 19

MUSINGS

by Terry Severhill

It should come as no surprise that the words crawl across the page like a spider with one leg missing.

Sorta skittering, not quite crab like with unknown intent or goal. Managing quite well without any conscious acknowledgement that there was a handicap or impediment of any sort. I write like I walk, sometimes boldly other times sorta skittering, crab like across the parking lot. Usually I have an idea or two of what to write, or what I’m going into the store to buy. But you never know what you’ll find on the clearance shelf or in the back recesses of my mind. I find oddities in discount stores and I see humor where there was no humor. Seeing a stuffed wiener dog on one aisle and a bottle of Viagra in the pharmacy, did you ever wonder what would happen if you gave a Wiener dog a Viagra pill? My writings are similar to that, random, skittering away from me, all gathered up in bunches of not niceties. Still like that proverbial blind chicken, my pecking’s occasionally find a kernel of? ? . . . truth? . . . beauty? . . . Coherence? . . . yeah something like that. Yet a part of me knows that poetry isn’t just about truth or beauty nor does it have to be coherent. Everyone rambles in life or in their head. Poets, writers, we know that the best just flows, trickling like that little creek on a plate in a Norman Rockwell painting. Sometimes it strikes us as a Jackson Pollock painting, unfettered but unconsciously extremely structured. Of course, rhymes at best are accidental and structures can’t always be built from sonnets, or with iambic pentameter. Perhaps a little Zen tea house out of haiku would be nice. Can anyone really visualise Bukowski writing sonnets, or Shakespeare haiku? Yeah. . . well, maybe. . . maybe.

Issue #1

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