There Was a City Built One Day

There Was a City Built One Day

I've watched the wind chisel the mist
Into a bright metropolis
And then within an instant's eye
Obliterate it from the sky.
Yet the ruins, they still persist
Amid the mind's periphery.


What lives were lived on avenues?
What miles were walked in stranger's shoes?
What families played on fragrant greens?
What suitors fashioned pleasant scenes?
What days declined upon the news
Of vanishing eternity?

A plague of pythons in my mind,
Fear and foreboding are entwined,
What if my thoughts are windswept dreams
Staccatoing in frail regimes
And I within this gloom confined
Dissolving to obscurity?



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Sometimes I get flashes of ideas, just a line or a phrase and I jot them down and file them away as incomplete.  Maybe I do not have the time or the interest or the full blown inspiration to take the flash to fruition or maybe I am tired or lazy or distracted.  Sometimes these will sit for hours or days but it is much more likely they will sit for months or years before I come back to them and see if there is anything workable to be found.  Often I will review these multiple times, trying out a line, a phrase, a concept, until I get bored or tired or feel as if I have something I would not hate to read.

I know this approach is not for everyone but it works for me and I enjoy it, especially as I see an idea take shape based on the experience I have had  between the conception and inspiration to finish the piece.

This poem began life as a single line, the first line in this case but that need not be typical.  I had a grand idea of how I was going to proceed and worked for an hour or two constructing a truly mediocre at best partial first stanza.  So I let it sit for a couple of month and revisited it a couple of time, defined a new rhyme scheme, wrote most of the 1st stanza, let it sit some more, came back to it, and finished the first stanza and tried a few passes at stanza 2, set it aside for a week or so, found my point of view in stanza two, set it down for a few days, looked into stanza 3 from a wildly different viewpoint and finally, today, spent a couple of hours getting stanza three into shape as something I did not hate..

During all of this the thesaurus has been my very best friend as needed words of a syllable less or more that had the same, similar, of wildly different  meanings.  Because sometimes inspiration comes at what you believe is the end and you find a poem suddenly has a bit more life than you had ever believed it could.

The culmination of the thought behind this poem is based off of an old idea that recently has gained in scientific standing.  What if there are parallel universes and what if we are nothing more than the transient glint as seen from one of them?  It's not deep, but I found it entertaining and my hope is that the meaning is clear enough and not tedious.

Oh, and on the technical side I used tetrameter and delved into a"

A
A
B
B
A
C

Rhyme scheme.  I've used variations o this in the past and I am still not certain how I like this iteration.