I don’t have a specific ritual for sitting down to write, I typically have a notebook in front of me and a pen, I find the pen helps. If I find myself without a notebook, I’ll type something in an email to myself until I have my notebook. Sometimes I have an idea meticulously planned out, other times I have a line in my head, sometimes I have a memory of mine bouncing around my mind, or a story I remember being told to me by a friend or some stranger I found myself engaged in a dialogue with. I have been known to simply create a story out of thin air in order to express myself in some sort of way. It’s not unusual for me bleed all of the above together in some sort of way. I wrote the following poem out of a story I heard from a young woman I met, she had an air of calm surrounding her as we spoke. A calm that could only be born out of chaos. I’ve found the greater the storms we weather the more serene we grow in the aftermath.

RUNAWAY BRIDE

Runaway bride

In her white wedding gown

Crossing the river

Till there’s no-one around

Her life was arranged

But she believed love should be found

Tired of speaking

Without making any kind of sound

What she hoped might float

Quietly and quickly sank till it drowned

Following the moon

Till she was praying on the ground

Knees covered in mud

In her wilted white wedding gown

Lost little girl

She was still a child

Pretty and pure

Dreams of walking down the aisle

Seemed they’d no longer be

Since she traded them for the wild

Life turned upside down

Family wedding exchanged for exile

She walked and walked

For many cold damp miles

Till she found a service station

They had a telephone she had a resigned smile

Called up a friend of hers

He said “I’m coming child”

Runaway bride

In her torn wedding gown

Tears magnifying her bright blue eyes

Hair dyed a silken caramel brown

But none of that mattered now

They’d call her epiphany a mere breakdown

She’d never go back to that place

Where she became the talk of the town

She couldn’t find a reason

To stay on somebody else’s merry-go-round

Her friend arrived with a bus ticket

Sent her South on an old Greyhound

A little cash and some old clothes

In exchange for her tattered wedding gown

Lost little girl

Found herself no longer a child

Grown into a woman

Flowered like a Lily of the Nile

Made a home in Louisiana

Stayed there for a little while

Before making a life down on the bayou

Her past remained unreconciled

But she’d tried her best

They wrote her off as juvenile

Her family traded listening for dismissal

But she accepted their denial

They were no more for understanding

And she was no more for being a lost little child