This is an exercise in how poems grow.

Last night, in a private email to someone, I asked to whom one prays when one does not believe in god(s) and anything beyond this life.  That sparked this draft of a poem:

draft

Is there a poem here somewhere?  Who do you pray to
when you can only imagine, maybe, ancestors and the spirits
of those you love who have died; and, what does it mean, Dad,
that as Father you never enter these invocations, the empty
place where you should dwell a curiosity when that absence
crosses my mind.

This has possibilities, but the main gist of it seems to be a story about me and my Father, not me and angels;  and angels, which may be ancestors or actually have their own unique individual selves, are something I do believe in.  So I meandered through a potential poem on the moon and then this came.  I’m not sure I consider it polished, but it’s definitely heading in the right direction.

angels

Judith Roche tells of angels with sharp sticks for a poke in the eye, and
Brian Andreas says there are angels whose only job it to make sure we
don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and  I picture angels not

as shining white-robed spirits, but as Angelique with her torn jeans and
dreads before they became the rage in fashion, who gathered sticks
for woodland structures and stones to pile into impossible towers;

I watch her leaving in a childhood move orchestrated by oblivious parents
dropping into a black hole from which even FaceBook cannot rescue her
and so she becomes a reflection of myself and my stories, half-remembered,

half-pretend (though my mind swears it is all true), giving this non-believer
in Santa and bearded gods on puffy clouds  someone to pray to when fate or mercury
retrograde traps me in transition between cocoon and unfurled butterfly.

**

I want to see the impetus of other writers, how their minds work, what sparks the magic that transmutes words into something more than the sum of the parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, participle, etc.

I am thinking about taking a course at Writers’ Village University (where I have just finished a 14 week tour de force on innovative writing with 28 weeks to go and a 2 week break in which I find myself lost for writing focus) on prose poetry.  Lucky me, Kindle allowed a download “taste” – enough to convince me that perhaps I need more than an idea about what and how prose poetry.