I forgot to blog for the last couple of days. Which frustrates me because I’m trying to write every day including writing on my blog every day because I have been avoiding writing because….well because.

Because it can be hard.

Because it can be bad.

Because I have nothing to write about (lie).

Or I am avoiding what I should write about or want to write about or need to write about (truth).

But today, I am bursting with words. I am getting ready to edit more of Polishing which finally feels like a novel and not a collection of chapters and scenes slapped together with a navel-gazing narrator watching everything but doing nothing.

And I am sketching out a poem. In reading my poetry workshop book, I loved how a poet tied together images of a childhood memory to create a moment of education, a moment in which the poet reflects on the sadness of the classroom, the inflexibility of an old teacher who has no joy within the subject matter or with his students. I could feel the cold rain running in rivulets down the warped glass panes. I could smell the mustiness of old chalk dust. And I could hear the monotone voice of the teacher calling out vocabulary words and their definitions. Or maybe he’s reciting historic facts. Or listing times-tables. The lesson is so dreary and mind-numbing, it has no merit. It is merely voice.

And so I need to write. But couldn’t think of anything to pen here.

So I snagged my Volume 1 of The Pocket Muse and flipped to the first prompt:

“A noise of a silence that won’t go away.”

Next to my classroom desk is my window. Situated on my windowsill is a blue faced, smiling solar powered vampire bobble head. Its splayed arms are a symmetrical anchor to the out-of-proportion head that wobbles atop the body.

The ticking is constant so long as the blinds are open and emitting sunlight. It ticks faster than my clocks second had, like I have two different times happening continually in my classroom. And I find the pulsations of my little Halloween toy soothing. The rhythmic tap-ticking sifts in the background. Monochromatic. Expectant. Consistent and constant.

Normally, I would find something like this to be distracting. After enduring the frustration of trying to block out the noise or acclimate to the noise, I would snatch the noisemaker from its place, stomp to the trashcan, and slam the noisemaker into the farthest, plastic depths. Rid myself of its infernal tacking.

But my little vampire has been with me for two and a half years. Tap-tick-tocking in his place in the window. Keeping my heartbeat and my clock company. He taps in counterpoint to Jimi Hendrix’s symphonic guitar riffs. He is a steady progression against Meredith Monk’s meditative vocalizations.

I rarely live within silence. Even if its the words in my head cycling through their paces. I find the world musical. When camping, I love to lie in my tent and listen to the wind sieving through the pine trees. The cascading voices of water burbling in the creek. And yet I love silence. Closing my mouth and siphoning away my voice and listening. To the something. To the nothing. And feeling the peace replete within it.

Now…where’s that poem?