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I struggled at first to come up with an image to accompany this poem. What sort of image is best to encompass dreams, imagination, thought? Initially, I browsed images of space and mountains and oceans, before I realized that that was the wrong direction. Imagination doesn't have to encompass grandeur, it simply has to be representative of the act of creation. With that in mind, I settled on a simple typewriter, and the romantic vision all writers harbor at one time or another of themselves sitting down to its formidable keys.
What appears on the white blank page is a pure act of creation. Now we can argue about influences and style and sources of inspiration, but the bottom line is that the page begins empty and ends filled. There is no shortcut around that, though it's rarely a linear process. Iterations have occurred through the ages via crossed out words, erased phrases, whited out punctuation marks, and, finally, the backspace key. Nonetheless, something is written.
In this case, the something that was written was a poem I penned back in 2016. I was reading Walden at the time, and it is clear that I had Thoreau and transcendentalism on my mind. One may even say he was a source of inspiration for this poem, though the words flowed through my pen. I write poetry only occasionally, and rarely do I do so in a structured manner. However, I wrote this poem as a Sonnet, which if you don't recall from tenth grade English, has 10 syllables per line and is written in iambic pentameter with an A-B-A-B, C-D-C-D, E-F-E-F rhyme style for the first three verses, followed by a G-G finish. In traditional spiritual fashion, imposing a little bit of structure seemed to bring out words that I would not have otherwise expected.
→The Writer's Mind
A bit of a walking contradiction;
He aimed to be so grounded, but instead
Filled his head with fantasies and fiction,
Dreaming bigger with each book that he read.
Witty and charming, though shy to a fault,
He craved the wilderness and solitude;
Which once attained, his mind ran without halt,
Longing for company he had eschewed.
He did not seek those familiar to him,
No, he sought those known only by his mind,
As if in a story of his own whim
Free to envision life as he inclined.
Still it left him adrift, wanting for more,
So again to his thoughts, worlds to explore.
