Hey Everyone!!
I trust you enjoyed ‘Naked as Eve’ by Rebecca McClanahan this month!! Caught in a whirlwind of poems like ‘First Meeting After the Separation’, ‘Regrets Only’, and ‘Teaching My Computer Dirty Words’, I often found myself clutching the bottom of my chair!!
Given these highly personal writings nonetheless, it’s easy to miss the reason why writers pen such words to start with. On the surface, it may seem as though only for an emotional release (…and appropriately so!) though in my opinion another reason is to attain escapism—a mental diversion or dissociation from an unpleasant reality.
Since I first delved into McClanahan’s works some years ago, I’ve written for escapism on countless occasions. Moreover, with a hope that two consecutive months of poetic readings have lent our minds a figurative eye, perhaps whenever we’re faced with an unpleasant situation throughout the month of May we can use our new eye to pen a few verses of whatever takes us away from our own realty (…even if only for a few moments).
Need an example? No worries—like McClanahan, I’m prepared to bare all…
While working at a bank years back, to escape a blaring office phone, a manager’s head which peeked over my cubical wall like clockwork, and a rising mound of paperwork atop my desk, I remembered I’d locked my computer and took an early lunch which consisted of a granola bar and an empty conference room where I read. After my hour nonetheless, I returned to my desk and stared at my cluttered inbox realizing my lunchtime reading hadn’t taken me far enough away from it all. While I clicked on first email nevertheless, something tapped a window a few cubicles back every other second. When I leaned into the aisle and peeked, I saw a frosted branch of a bald tree swaying in the winter wind. Before long, I printed a document and ambled to a printer beside the window and stood gazing into a courtyard blanketed with snow. Suddenly, I imagined I was staring out the window of a huge estate and the courtyard outside was its backyard. When I returned to my desk however, instead of charging into my inbox, I took three minutes to write a poem (expressed below) which afforded me the escapism I needed to manage the rest of my work day (…as I read it back from time to time)…
Hence for May, when faced with an unpleasant or arduous event, try writing a few verses about whatever separates you from it and then see how you feel afterward.
Many thanks nonetheless, and we’ll see next month-end, except for now, please enjoy, ‘She Was Made of Stone’:
She’d moved. She didn’t want me to know she’d moved but she had. I inched out onto the patio, crept to the edge of the brick. Her arms remained stationary along with her legs but her head had shifted as though she’d found something to peek at through one of the estate windows just as I had found her interesting peeking out. Or, was she staring at… I glanced at her. Of course not, she was made of stone.