bunrab | writing, difficulties thereof

I have been working on a sonnet about my recent ICD removal experience. What???? Are you crazy??? Well, of course I'm crazy, but that's got nothing to do with this. The thing is, the final couplet dropped into my head, along with the knowledge that it WAS the final couplet of a sonnet, and a suggested metaphor for the rest of the sonnet, while I was in the hospital. And the final couplet is damn good. If I could always write something that packed that much emotional punch, I'd dare breathe this sonnet's name in the same page with "On His Blindness." At least, that's the way it seemed to me in my drug-induced haze in the hospital. Of course, I can't write the rest of it that good, which is why I will NOT ever be mentioned in the same book, let alone the same page, as Milton. Nonetheless, even without the drug-induced haze, it's a damn fine couplet,and worth making the effort to write a sonnet that attempts to come near it. But I am having trouble with the metaphor - everything I attempt to write about it sounds more like farce, or a parody of the intended metaphor. Trying to get it to sound serious and emotional is very knotty. And it looks like I'm going to have to pick a rather peculiar rhyme scheme, given what's suggested itself so far. I started out with ABABAB CDCDCD EE, but that really sounded stupid. Then ABCABC DEFDEF GG suggested itself, but after a couple of tries I realized that wasn't quite right. What seems to be coming clear is that the rhyme is going to have to be ABCCBA DEFFED GG. Which is a little weird, but still permitted, I think. Anyway, a few more days of the hydromorphone-influenced hours during which my surgical dressing is changed, and it should shape up to within shouting distance of a final product. Yes, morphine, a/k/a good old opium, does have something to do with how much poetry I can think of. I've written poetry without morphine, of course, and I have no intention of taking this painkiller one single day longer than I have to, but I will admit that the floatingness of the brain does spark something.

Almost everything I do in the way of "art" drops into my head whole and entire, waiting only for me to produce something externally that matches it. And usually, no hydromorphone is involved. Usually, plain old antidepressant-influenced dreams are what does it. I have had entire quilts drop into my head, complete finished pattern, all I have to do is find the fabric that matches what I saw, and cut it up, and put it together the way I saw it. Those of you who have seen the Chips 'n Salsa quilt I gave to Bill and Kathy for their wedding - good heavens, was that 10 years ago??? - well, that was one of the quilts that just showed up in my brain and said to me "go out and buy fabric, and make me." And songs have done the same - the one I sang at Anita's wedding last year pretty much had dropped into my head, words and tune, the previous fall, needing only a slight bit of fine-tuning (pardon the pun) from my conscious mind, before being ready, and it told me it was for someone's wedding - I just had to wait a bit to find out whose. And the songs that are waiting for me to write them down right now - the two for the Montgomery Village Community Band to play, that involve christmas arrangements - those pretty much did the same thing. Dropped into my head nearly complete, I can hear just about everything in there, now all I have to do is get my MIDI keyboard to sound the same, so I can write them down. They also needed only the slightest bit of thinking to tweak them - a few parts where it wasn't quite clear what instruments were playing, where I had to decide "oh, that's a saxophone quartet" and "yeah, that's the oboe and the clarinet together" rather than already knowing, as I did for other parts, that one theme would be increasing numbers of trumpets/cornets, etc.

I don't know if I'd ever be able to produce any art any other way. I mean, when I was taking early music classes in college, of course I wrote the requisite canons for homework, and produced figured bass arrangements for a few lines, but those weren't art; they were clearly only exercises that had nothing to recommend them except meeting the technical requirements of the form. And I've never managed to write any poetry except limericks that didn't come to me nearly whole, and even the best limerick I ever wrote was one that came to me whole, although I had to think about the theme in order to make it appear. That was the one that won a contest in International Wildlife magazine some 17? years ago.

So I don't know. This sonnet didn't appear complete - but the couplet did, and it seems worth the effort. You all will be the first to know if I ever manage to write 12 more lines that match it!