When January rolls around, as it will before I can blink properly, it will have been two Januarys since I wrote a poem called “Waking up between seven and ten in the morning”, only to never publish it. It does strike me odd that for all the words I have written since then, it has stuck within my notes. A handful of words kept safe for two years, but now, it has become a monument of the peace I felt then. Not that the peace has dissipated, but time passes, and things change, and how we feel on a particular day twists and turns until it is a memory we hold fondly between our hands. And things have indeed changed. Of course, I will not put the poem here now. These sentences are no prelude. This passage leads to nothing.
Now, the poem is for my eyes only. I read it every week on days as useless as Tuesdays. We, artists, must reserve a few bits and pieces for ourselves. Not that it is a great poem by any measure. There is no meter nor any rhyme. It is the cardinal sin. We must only break the rules we know, and I know nothing about poetry. The free verse without knowing anything else is, after all, blasphemy. Just as it is to write with a flipped order of the clauses, but in my defence, I know my way around prose. I know I break the rules often, but I prefer to write how people talk, and if you ever listen to people, you, too, will notice the pauses, or the ands, and the ors, the perhapses and the maybes, and the sentences which never end. But are only interrupted. Often to take a breath or to sip some water.
People also often talk in hyperbole. Take me, for example. When January rolled into February two years ago, I believed I could spend my life in this city, and that I had found all the joy there was to find. Bold claims. Now, I know there is more, so much more to this life, and the poem, as I said, is a monument, and I reckon I built it too early, but not, I hope, to last. Until then, I shall look at it in passing as you often do at relics of the past.