This is a rare peek into a poet's brain.
The only thing I can compare it to is a magician's brain, but a magician can mess with physics and I, personally, don't think the laws of physics can be found in any of my poems. The reason I'm comparing the two brains is because of the obvious trickery involved and the joy we get out of puzzling our audience or stumping them with mysterious but subtle clues into the dark areas of the unknown. With magic, it is actually possible to find out the exact answer to your questions by reading up on books about Houdini and David Copperfield. These magical books about sleight of hand, usually explain the basics of prestidigitation as a foundation for the larger, more complicated illusions such as slicing a woman in half. Usually, we don't want to know the 'how' behind the entertainment and enjoy the show for exactly what it was intended to be--fun.
On the other hand, there are those of us who can't sleep at night not knowing. We toss and turn and ask our friends while it plays with the wiring in our brain--how did he do it? How can that be done? What is the answer?
Robert Frost spoke about poetry being a puzzle, a trip into the unknown. Usually, the poets I like to read such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dickinson, Coleridge, Plath, Robert Service, T.S. Eliot and Bukowski all seem to be immersed in very sad, edge of life elements as if they sat on the verge of dying, dangling their toes above Hell. The dark unknown was/is obviously their own mortality, and the puzzling solutions are something sacred, something no one will ever know while they are alive.
The happier tones in Frost, Whitman, William Carlos Williams,and Ogden Nash still leave me stumped some of the time and wondering about the actual idea, the musical cadence, the scene or scent that led them to a pen during a specific emotion.
Humbly, I write my own feelings about the unknown, secret-passages in my head that I want to share with my friends and readers who perhaps feel like I'm not explaining myself clearly. Some of my poems, even a few of the published ones, don't even make sense to me anymore. I look at the name underneath the poem-- it's different than the one I have now. I try to remember what the young woman was trying to express, what emotion led her to her pen...and I realize that that writer, that young woman no longer exists. My poems are self-contained snippets of my life. Similar to a short film clip, a cartoon cel, a snapshot into the past, my verse provides an instantaneous image, a mysterious, X-ray of a poet's mind.
