Polaroid Poetry

It feels like the weeks are flying by! I'm convinced that as we get older, time passes faster. Years that once crawled by are now speeding past me like a blurry bullet of days I get through only to forget them. My "new" baby is almost 9 months now, and my girls will be on Christmas break in a month, and then on to the second half of the school year. Winter is almost here - it gets closer every day - and the holidays are rushing up to this last-second shopper (last-second everything, honestly) like the guy who WANTS THE BALL. Before I know it, I'm going to be back to doing it all in 2014.

For the past seven weeks (and for another month) I've had a crazy busy schedule. Three classes, work five days a week, three kids, a fair ginger lover, at least five submissions to literary magazines and I've recently launched a full-on effort to find freelance work to gain employable writing experience. I'm ready to share my words and ready to bring my editing skills to the right people, for the right price, of course. At this point, my price is experience, so get your edits and proofreads in now while I'm still broke and humble!

I kid. I'm just... I'm ready to be part of something bigger.

Right now, it's a little ridiculous. But I'm loving it, thriving in the chaos and satisfaction of taking on so much ambition. It's the most productive environment I could be in. Starting in January, I'll be back to online classes (the same ones I swear I'll never take again, every term) so I'll have more time to work, more time to rake in that cabbage. Cabbage. God, I love fun words! My goal, however, is not to have to run for it, so much, but to make more of an effort to put my name "out there" and let the cabbage float to me.

However, I know that is completely unreliable and I don't plan on depending upon pretty words to pay the rent, so I'll be turning more tables, too, I'm sure.

My point, as long as it has taken me to get to it, is that life is crazy and it's flying by. It doesn't wait for you, and it doesn't allow you to take the scenic route unless you make the effort to slow down and look for yourself. Don't let it slip through your fingers. Don't lose the moments through the blur of the passing weeks. Stop and smell the roses, and write a poem about it!

I like to think of poems, especially the short and sweet ones I like to write, as Polaroids of our lives. They're quick snapshots of what we felt in those moments. I can remember things I wanted to remember, but unless I write them down, I don't remember what those things I wanted to remember were, only that I wanted to remember them.

I've recently found a poet who captures moments like this so perfectly. I discovered her on Pinterest, actually, but she's got a Facebook page that's gaining more "likes" every day. She hails from Sydney and is currently hanging out in Singapore, promoting her amazing book Love and Misadventure. Her name is Lang Leav, and what I love about her work is the style in which she writes. Our styles are very similar, and she writes about what she knows, the most exquisite feelings us normal people feel without having words to put to them. She puts her feelings, those moments shared between lovers, into such simple terms that not only can we understand what she's trying to convey, but we can feel almost like we're there, like we're the lover, or we're the loved one, and for me, at least, it feels like she's taken the words right out of my soul and put them on paper. I wish I had found those words in high school, rather than have the hassle of the last nine years and countless adversities to get through before finding the happiness I have today! She is the cure for what I recently found out was actually a word - that difficulty or inability to describe emotions as we feel them - alexithymia. What I love most about Leav's poetry is that she has a way of picking out the smallest moments and blowing them up so we can see the beauty in them. She forces us to slow down and enjoy the moment in the minute, the hour, the experience. Her voice speaks the volumes that still sit on the shelves in my heart. I admire her words and I'd like to share a few of my favorite examples with you.

Xs and Os

Love is a game
Of tic-tac-toe,
Constantly waiting, 
For the next X or O.


LOVE LETTERS

Every letter
   That she types,
    Every keystroke
    That she strikes
To spell your name
   again and again
   is all she ever 
   wants to write.


CLOSURE

Like time suspended,
   A wound unmended
   You and I.

We had no ending,
   Said no goodbye.

For all my life,
   I'll wonder why.


Tell me, ladies... tell me that you didn't just swallow a lump in your throat as you got angry for a second at the bitch who just stole your words. Was that just me? When I first started reading Lang Leav's poetry, I was almost furious. I felt like Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train in the scene where Anne Ramsay just figured out the word Billy Crystal's character had been fumbling for through the entire film. I wanted to find this lovely Aussie Asian woman and steal my words back. As I read further, I just fell further and further in love with what she wrote about - because she works the same way I do. She found her Muse and celebrates him with every syllable. While the subject of her poetry is usually the same, she writes it in such a way that makes each piece new, and makes us read it in a way we hadn't thought to think of it before. Love is complex enough as it is - and I thank Lang Leav for finding the words to unravel the confusion and put it in simple terms for us.

Thank you so much for coming back this week. Please enjoy each and every moment of the next week until we meet again. xoxo :)



Leav, L. (2013). Love and misadventure. Andrews McMeel Publishing. Kansas City, Missouri. 

Silver, S. (1987). Throw momma from the train. Orion Pictures Corporation. Los Angeles, California.