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eftychia at 03:27am on 2004-07-06Enough of making ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
blumindy wait for it; I found
myself awake and decided to have a whack at editing this poem.
But the edit turned into a complete rewrite.
A late night driving poem
Dry pavement, clear weather, sparse traffic, wee hours, my
Right ankle trembles and wants to push harder.
Holiday weekend with increased enforcement, a
Ticket's too risky so pick up the hammer.
Wide road with lots of lanes, moon on smooth asphalt, the
Cruise control set a mere nickel past legal;(Patience, patience, patience, patience)
White lines which normally flit past my eyeballs now
Trickle past mocking my leisurely travel.
A mile every minute feels slow to this child of the
Late second half of the twentieth Cent'ry.
Surrounded by metal with rubber beneath me and
Fire before me propelling me forward,(Patience, patience, patience, patience)
Rolling along with an eye to the shoulders
A mere fourteen times my height forward per second;
Itching to fly so much faster than this on these
Four lanes a side of nice, smooth macadam,
Knowing that half again faster I'd still not be
Pressing the limits of car or of driver.(Patience, patience, patience, patience)
Holiday weekend with troopers aplenty and
Goodness alone knows who else is about --
Heed the advice from the telly and slow it down,
Schedules are flexible, there is no hurry --
Controlling impatience and setting the cruise control
Calmly proceeding to my destination.
The germ of that came to me while I was driving south on I-95 between the Baltimore and Washington beltways; not, perhaps, as dead-straight a stretch as the poem implies, but there are long enough straight sections, and the curves are quite gentle. It started out sortakinda like this:
Wee hours,with some of that coming to me as I was driving and the rest filling itself in once I got to a computer to start writing it down (and probably a cool trick or two getting forgotten along the way). But then I got the idea that I wanted to take this "poetic-ish stream-of-consciousness imagery" and turn it into a somewhat more conventional poem. I was going to just even out the meter, but then I got the bright[?] idea to try to give it an "urgent pulse" with "slow-down breaks" in it, and dactylic tetrameter (or octometer if you don't like how I divided the lines) just seemed like the way to do "I want to go faster". Unfortunately, I may have left the revised version feeling too contrived, too artificial ... At this point I'm not sure which version I prefer, and I may come back to this and try again at each -- both editing the original form and starting over with the more conventional form) and see whether I can fix what I see as the flaws in each, and then try to decide which I prefer.
Long, straight road,
Clear weather,
Dry pavement,
Sparse traffic;
My right ankle quivers to go faster.
Big holiday weekend,
Increased enforcement,
Expensive tickets
Too risky;
Pick the hammer up and set the cruise control instead.
Bright full moon,
Wide road,
Many lanes,
Smooth asphalt,
The white lines on the blacktop that usually flit past my eyes
Trickle by me instead.
To this child of the twenty-and-a-halfth Century
A mile every minute feels slow indeed.
Patience,
Patience.
The cruise control is a good thing
But I itch to fly.
When I am surrounded by a steel cage with fire harnessed in place of horses,
Fourteen body-lengths per second is not fast enough.
your poem
(no subject)
Something funny is I was halfway playing with a poem with "patience" as the key word as well, but my subject matter is pottery *grin*.
(no subject)
You are right: making me wait is generally a BAD idea!
Both versions are lovely and each has a different feel of urgency.
You shouldn't rewrite either but if you feel unfinished you should just make it a progressive series, like sketches into a painting.
Many *Hugs* Kind of glad I could hurry you along. *grin*
PS: 'nickel' ['halfth?' That isn't a word, is it? Sorry --- teacher-itis.]
(no subject)
Halfth -- I often respond to "is that a word?" with "I, a native speaker, have used it and thou, a native speaker, hast understood it; ergo a word it is, QED," but in this case no, I deliberately chose a wrongword/nonword; it's supposed to sound just a little broken there because none of the right ways to say it both scanned and conveyed the tone of voice I wanted at the same time.
I make up words
As in, I fully enjoy all my evility.
A friend told me it wasn't a word and I told her I could make it one if I wanted. And, yes, that exchange of 'we know what it means' was included :-)
The poems were lovely and what you write (otherwise) makes me smile.
Re: I make up words
Two memories are called to mind; the first time I used the word "heterogenous" in conversation, the person two whom I was speaking called me on it and told me it wasn't a word. I replied that if it wasn't one before, it was as of that moment because I'd formed it according to the rules. Then I found a dictionary and there it was (along with the preferred form, "heterogeneous").
And another time, in response to a lover's pun, I picked up a pillow and menaced her with it, miming smiting her, and saying "wapiti wapiti wapiti wapiti!" She broke down in giggles and said, "Wapiti? That's not a word!" I replied that it was clearly onomatopoeia and therefore automatically valid. She countered that it wasn't in the dictionary. I figured it was worth a shot, so I pulled out her OED and ... there it was! She gave me an astonished, "You have no right to be able to get away with shit like that!" look. Betrayed by her own library.
Though I now confess (hoping she's not reading this) that the spelling I'd been looking for was "whappity". Fortunately the pronounciation of "wapiti" works. :-)
I need to get back into the habit of writing poems. I don't do it as much as I used to.
Re: I make up words
:s/two whom/to whom/
What an unfortunate place for me to glitch that. *grumble*