Before You Write

Before you begin

With both eagerness and anxiety

Rolling through your veins

Take a moment to consider

The seat holding you

How easily you contour

To its shape

Taking for granted

You will be held

Until your task is done

Before you make a mark

Pick up the paper

Feel its solidity

Despite near cell-thin width

How if you were to crumble it

(But don’t!)

It could be loosened from destruction

Once more sharing its message

Before a thought

Takes hold of your mind

And a direction is chosen

Feel the length of your pen

How it is just long enough

To project you into possibilities

Yet imagined

But it’s hard to wait sometimes

As if ideas are fireflies

Seen only in darkness

Never in the same place twice

Yet the practice of craft

Is also a physical quest

A search for substance in words

Too often we rush to forget

The body that moves us

To embalm arcs of time

Immortalized on paper

So notice what you are doing

Feel the world of solitary listening

Fill the page

With what only the senses

Can discern is true.