How Do I Love Thee?

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The slight meandering of your crooked smile
Dancing-spider-palm-tree-shadows on evening walks
Laughter free, full of life
Eyes vivacious-sparkled with secret mirth

Hands intertwined in communicative connection
Joy embedded in simple activity
Patience held in high regard
Sacred night a stroll through nature’s peace

A breath
A life
A love
A moment

All existence reduced to important tasks
Like sighs
Like smiles
Like wonderment
Like snuggles
Like snowflakes
Like raindrops
Like sunshine in the heart

Flow
Words
Concepts
Realities

Fingertips recognize the impossibility of this task
Understanding all this author asks
Find your love in all which surrounds you
Step out of stress, you will find this true

Creativity and the core of your heart

Writing. The craziest, most beneficial exercises of my life. Struck this morning by my withdrawals due to a self-inflicted sabbatical from writing, I’ve felt the floodgates bursting to create. Any topic. Anything. I simply must write.

The pressures of people weigh upon me far too much. I take on their pain, their criticisms, their harshness, their bitterness. Don’t tell me to stop. The effort conflicts with my nature, my definition of who I am and who I desire to
be.

I truly, to this day, feel alone surrounded by people. Even though I enjoy emceeing events, especially my Inspired Mic where creatives enjoy a platform for their own definitions of who THEY are, I still feel the dark loneliness
which only abates in close connection with love or, most often, with a blank page and the freedom to spew.

My writing champion, whom I miss dearly, Ray Bradbury, once wrote, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” The past two years may be somewhat of a hangover triggered by my sabbatical, yet contained within these past two years are a number of writing successes like the third-place achievement of one of my short stories, (found here – A Matter of Time by Michael Ray King – 3RD PLACE), and other pieces I feel effused through a higher quality of writing.

This day the poem preceded the post. I am thankful for my creative resurgence. Regardless of whether anyone reads this but me, I am content and drunk on my creative writing. Another of Mr. Bradbury’s quotes goes on to say so much more about writing. This quote has been paraphrased many times, but I feel the entirety of his observation stands stronger than the sum of its parts:

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let
them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury