The Poet Blames her Pen

Mind a cauldron of chaos,
doggerel has made me vomit,
it’s bitter and thick on my tongue.
Some words give me indigestion.

But I love the fruity fragrance
of words that saturate my brain
like a sunny day.

I see them falling into aerobatics,
like flocks of birds delighting in the sky,
clapping their wings in applause
as they descend into stanzas,
oscillating until they are satisfied.

The distant murmuration of poetry turns
into grey and white feathers
swooping earthward,
to be grounded
by hard pen on paper,
and I jump up and dance
fast and furious.

I shall be dancing
until I shake off every poem
into an anthology of shimmies.

Kim M. Russell, 17th June 2025

Image by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

Merril is our host for Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub. She tells us that after reading a prompt on BlueSky on defeat, she’s been thinking about “how close the line sometimes is between triumph or victory and defeat. A war may turn on a battle. One side wins, and the other side is defeated. In a sports event, one side usually wins, and one side loses; similarly, this occurs in elections, and in things such as getting a job, or a grant. In love, someone might choose one partner over another.” 

Merril says that she also thought of how, sometimes, “one is defeated, but that turns out for the best. Perhaps you didn’t get a job you really wanted, but then you ended up with one you liked much more. Perhaps you heard later that the person you thought you loved turned out to be a horrible person.”

She has given us examples of poems by Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou and Maggie Smith that tackle these ideas and the theme “Krisis is the space between what was and what will be”.

I have reworked an old poem from 2022.

33 thoughts on “The Poet Blames her Pen”

  2. This is absolutely stunning! 😍 I especially love these lines; “I see them falling into aerobatics, like flocks of birds delighting in the sky, clapping their wings in applause as they descend into stanzas, oscillating until they are satisfied.” ❤️❤️

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  3. Oh how I love “the distant murmuration of poetry!” What a brilliant phrase–and all those poems flying around.

    I can also relate to the doggerel that makes you vomit. 😂

    Thank you, Kim!

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  6. Kim, I liked the imagery in this poem. It made me check to see if someone was eavesdropping on my mind – it also zings, bounces and ricochets. There are notebooks and scraps of paper dotted all around the house from years of scrawling random poetic fragments anywhere and everywhere. I write in pencil so no ink to leak or stain but the shavings escape the bin and smudge everywhere- probably the shimmying you describe!

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      1. I prefer Mitsubishi Uni-Stars in B: very smooth and dark enough without being soft. I’m waiting for a new box to arrive (today?) so in the meantime I’m using ancient Staedtler HBs found in the back of a drawer.

        In some of my oldest notebooks (pre-2000, some as early as 1990), where I used cheap ballpoint pens, the ink has eaten paper away. Fortunately, I typed those poems up years ago and was able to recover the content earlier this years (Claris Works files).

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  7. I think it was Norman Mailer who said the writer had to beware of rapture when writing his or her own words. Fall in love too much with how you’re saying something and you’ll end up writing crap. It’s why I don’t smoke dope any more — my murder of crows always looked too much like an exaltation of larks … Getting that wake of vultures to stop dancing like cranes is the challenge. At least, in the space of Microsoft Word, no one can hear me scream between edits.

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  8. I simply cannot imagine my life without the beauty you’ve describe in this poem … a balancing act absolutely but folks who can think objectively, write creatively, find the beauty in living are eons ahead of the rest of the pack … people who try to create chaos in our minds, our bodies, our souls.

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