In My Spare Time
I have done it all – painted masterpieces in my head, from Hudson Valley School, with my mountain tops blurring to mystery, to abstract impressions, with my colorful moods splashed here and there. I have hummed rhapsodies and symphonies of my own composing, waltzes and minuets, grand things I hum very softly, become performer and audience at once. I have imagined great novels, novels filled with everything human, our plot-structured lives, with love and sex and death and all those things that rise or descend to be parts of people. I have written immortal poems in the air, traced words worth saying, lined up metaphors, personified truth and walked her down invisible pages, felt the magic of the well realized line, the lilt of rhyme. I have appeared on stages set in motion in my dreams, starred in well-made plays I made that well, in tragedies so painful that I even heard tears of relief at curtain time, in comedies that I saw myself in and learned the humor of my ways, and all alone I laughed out loud. I dance beautifully at certain times, when I’m alone and my muse strikes the right chord, interpretive dance, I’ve been a bird, a butterfly, a bamboo forest, rain falling softly, falling in torrents, I have felt the heat and dryness as I moved, held my partner just so, held the moment just so, never knowing where the dance left off and I began. I have sung my heart out in the shower, hit notes only shampoo can bring out in me, became the music and words of the songs I would sing in public if only, if only, if only, and then it all goes down the drain, leaves nothing worth mentioning, not even an echo. I have done it all, but it adds up to only this.
J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Write Room, Poetry Super Highway , Mad Swirl, and Clutching at Straws.
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