Paris, 1899

A continuation from here. 

Take time & imagine

A landscape, like hands, warm

& a plane melting into clouds

silently & beautifully as we watch

from down below,

Rose.

Imagine

A scene, like a film, unfolding

enfolding, embracing

tasting like mulled wine, in my mouth

on an autumn day

Cold tongues licking cold ice-creams

A divot, in the glass, in the kaleidoscope, in eyes

Colours aflame

Don't look,

see.

People in graceful waves

These houses must be made of paper, I'm sure

Buildings transform into

shades,

& well

There are a hundred ways to look at the city

but I like my view the best of all.

By the river

the birds cry out,

& the river begins to sing.

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A lot of the time, for me, poetry comes out of a single moment of intense emotion & flows out as if it were seamless dialogue between people. The greatest instance of this happening was in Paris last year, on a three-week-long backpacking trip with two dear friends. I remember we were sitting on the left side of the River Seine, taking photographs & savouring salted caramel & vanilla ice-creams that we had bought with the last of our money. Paris, in all its romanticism & sepia tones & language with its elegant twists & turns, is an inspiration in itself. I remember that it was very cold & the wind was very harsh (even though it was summer) & we were all laughing at the irony of eating ice-cream in such freezing weather, & the very posh & reserved Parisians were looking crossly at us but we didn't care & laughed anyway, & it was all very beautiful & at that moment I started making leaps into my notebook & scribbled masses of words, lines, stanzas. It was just a pity, to not capture that single moment in time on paper, if you know what I mean. I sent it home on a postcard to my family the very next day.

There's a lot that goes into the process of writing poetry, the conscious or unconscious aspect of it all, that's become very interesting to me. Over the course of this semester, I've realised that writers basically fall into two groups: those who sit down & dedicate a portion of their day to writing & mulling over ideas, carefully constructing poems over a duration & creating masterpieces & inspired projects. While I respect these people very much, it's an attitude that I can never hope to emulate because as said before, most of the time, inspiration for me comes from an image or an atmosphere, & transforms itself into a poem or a song. To be honest, it sometimes feels like I'm cheating, like I have snatched the line from thin air & made it my own...