Sunday, December 20, 2009

Waking to strange sounds

the upstairs neighbour's shower

sounds like rain

rain in the tropics, heavy drops on a tin roof

rippling rattles of bright thuds

throbbing through my whole apartment

dinning through my tin-roofed head

loud, too loud, yet oddly restful

conjuring sleep

while still preventing it

unwelcome noise

but impossible to resent

a reminder of rain

rain in the tropics

a reminder of another bed, another time

a conversation about rain

 
 
A recent jotting, this, perhaps no more than a sketch.  Not quite a poem, but something in that awkward middle ground between poetic prose and notes for a poem.  All the same, I rather like it.  A pure stream-of-consciousness thing: the 'creative process' here, such as it was, consisted simply in suppressing a lot of what might have been included - trying to identify the source of the noise, trying to get back to sleep, the details of the images and memories that came to mind, that final conversation and where it led.  Less is more.
 

1 comment:

JES said...

Oooh, I like this bit: "rippling rattles of bright thuds/throbbing through my whole apartment/dinning through my tin-roofed head." Sort of collapses multiple sensory impressions one inside the other, like one of those nested camping cups, e.g. this (conveniently enough: made in China!).