Poetics

The thing about writing on a schedule is that one has to write. And this has good and bad to it. Because you end up writing when you thought one had nothing to say, but, ah, you also end up writing when you have nothing to say.

Regardless:

I call to my heart; I call to my head
Three more steps and then I'm dead.

This could be an interesting one to analyze, once I'm sufficiently removed from this moment in time--I wrote the couplet on 11/19/11--because it was in my head sort of like a song that gets stuck there. There wasn't a feeling of working on it, really, my mind just happened to go there. I did consider changing the number of steps to be a Ragnarok reference (after Thor's bitten by a serpent), but three's plenty important.

The lack of punctuation at the end of the first line is thoughtful, by the way.

My child,
My daughter,
My son--
There's much in you that yet is blood-wild
And so much in you that's yet to come

"Blood-wild" linked to several things essentially simultaneously. One is childbirth: though not all of us come out screaming or crying, we do all come out bloody and wild--"wild" in this case as the opposite of "civilized" or "domesticated". Another is battle, which, often, means returning to one's body, one's senses, anoesis. This is why people have to train so hard: you either keep your forebrain working well--an astounding feat--or you don't, but you can do your job anyway, because your body knows what to do.

The lack of lack punctuation is actually my favorite part of this one. When I read a sentence that ends a paragraph and has no ending punctuation, it feels like a little bit of a jerk. The simple fact that's it's poetry removes the complete, "You didn't resolve that sentence!" feeling, to my mind, but it's still important. What's yet to come never ends, after all

Soon you will not wander in my wake;
In truth, you were never mine to take.

This would be connected to the above poem if I could figure out what comes between that stanza and this couplet. What it's talking about is the fact that, despite how much energy a parent pours into a child, the child is a person in eir own right. A youngling may follow for almost two decades, but it's not like sculpting, where one has a statue one owns at the end. The final creation can survive on its own--that's the point.

...Speaking of interesting to analyze once I've got some perspective, this'll be interesting to look at if/when I become a parent.