Could You Write A Poem?

What I love about April: tulips, daylight, spring rain, and National Poetry Month.

Could you write a poem?

Could you write a poem every day for thirty days?

Maybe you've never written a single one.

Then again, maybe you've created poems all of your life and haven't realized it.

Did you ever snatch the perfect word when writing a note to a friend?  Did you find yourself slowing down when you got to the scary part of a ghost story? Did you rework the punchline of a joke until it was exactly right?

If you've enjoyed the flow of words once or twice; if you've taken care to be brief; if you've savored a message and the way you delivered it: chances are, you wrote a poem. You merely called it something else. 

A poem is simply a collection of words you have arranged carefully, like a gourmet appetizer set on a plate to be admired and appreciated slowly.

There are no rules beyond what you set up for yourself. It's all about your tastes. What do you enjoy? What flavors tickle your palate? What sounds and words and images are you drawn to?  

Our everyday words are meat and potatoes. Sometimes we grab hamburgers on the go. But poems capture a moment.

Communications tend to run long and messy because we're in a hurry. But writing a poem asks you to slow down.

Instead of creating on a large scale, you're paying attention to the soft, small things: the sound of the words when you read them out loud. The way the lines move across the page.

Would you like

to

space

them

out?

Would you like to runthemtogether?

What do you want? What do you dream of? What makes you play?

Spark: Set aside ten minutes, and put down anything that comes to mind. Write fast and messy, with an idea that you're not going to block a single thought, feeling, or word. Call it a poem, just because.