Inspiration from MS Medina

If thoughts were words,
a prolific author I would be.
Taking a bath,
a story in it's entirety plays

through my mind.

Walking, anywhere,
the thoughts begin
and, hey, they sound
darn good to me.

Out of the tub,
home from the walk,
pen in hand,

or

better yet,
open Notepad,
fingers ready on the keys.

As I sit and stare,
thought words that.
flowed quite
easily
simply disappeared.

08/0/2007 mar

"You can drown a thought by expressing it in too many words." author unknown
"Never use two words when one will do." author unknown
"Less is better." author unknown

To paraphrase a song, I talk too much, I worry me to death, I talk, talk, ta-all-al-alk, talk too much. When someone would mention my over-windedness, I would say: "If you think I talk too much you should hear my sisters. I'm the quiet one in the family." The flip side of that coin is most people tell me: "You are too quiet." or ask: "Do you ever talk?". My father told me: "I always know which daughter is in the car." by the lack of conversation when I was the one in the back seat. If it were one of my sisters back there, Mom would be sitting sideways to carry on long, animated conversation from her seat in the front.

"When all is said and done, more gets said than done." is a maxim I could relate to. I thought everybody talks too much, and I prefer the sounds of silence. Or nature. Or music. When nervousness flipped the motor-mouth switch, I would watch and listen from outside of myself. "I sound like D", I would think. D is the motor-mouth queen among my sisters; a fast and sometimes confusing talker. Another sister talks slow and will not pause for breath, lest you try to get a word in edgewise. People have fallen asleep during her midnight phone calls and she never noticed; just kept on talking. The third can tell her life story to the bank teller.

"If you have nothing to say, never say it out loud." is another ditty that applied to me. One thing I hate is being the center of attention and perhaps the attention my quietness brought me was what caused me to take on my sisters' personas and try to tell my life story to the bus driver as quickly as possible. Or a date. I also hate questions. I already know about me, I want to know about you. Me is old and boring. You is new. "It takes too long to tell", was a fav line of mine. Talking about events of the past somehow puts me back there and colors my frame of mind.

The story I wrote in my head in the tub is what I sat down to write when I opened Notepad. Instead I typed that poem, thinking about a poem I read last night by M S Medina, "Writing Insanity". I never liked the poetry part of English Literature class. The poems we read were long, boring and made no sense to me. My classmates eagerly wrote poems, seemingly effortlessly. I had the same problem with writing a poem that I had writing a short story or essay. I was born to read, not write. Getting too much attention by talking too much, is what caused me to teach myself to write poetry as an adult.

Mastering poetry, especially haiku, would teach me brevity in speaking. My first poem was for my mom. I used the letters m-o-t-h-e-r in a line, like we used to do in elementary school, trying to make the sentences that described her rhyme. I started checking books of poetry out of the library to learn style. Did I learn brevity in oral or written speech? Do not think so. "My Health Care Nightmare" is over 3,000 words. The thought of editing it down was so daunting, I wrote a new one. This brings me to the last line of Medina's poem and this unedited essay that I made up as I went along. Now, on to that bathtub story.

Author's Note: Then there are those headlines to create and abstracts to entice someone to read what one wrote. My mom did not say what I attributed to her in the abstract for this article,, it is just one of the lines I use when I talk.