If It Doesn’t Happen, Something Else Will

I went to a poetry meeting last night and it was lovely.  As to my work, I was totally satisfied.  It’s like this:  The last reading was only a couple of weeks ago, so when this one was announced, I was in a bit of a self-induced panic.  I say self-induced because I know that nobody else is worried about only presenting original material, and I certainly could just bring a couple of my books and read random selections, and almost nobody in the audience would have ever heard them before, but I’ve got my own rules and I almost always abide by them.
So, I had an idea, and I began to execute it.  The idea was to pick a theme, then pick a rhyme scheme that I liked, and hammer it out.  As an assignment, I felt I could do it.  The theme was that all art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, drama, and even all science, is latent, floating in the air around us, the ideas are real just because they are possibilities, and possibilities are real.  The artist is just a miner, a farmer, a collector of stones from the beach.  The rhyme scheme I chose was that used by Tennyson in The Lady of Shalott.  Lots of rhymes in a swiftly flowing meter.
I had the first couple of stanzas and it was the morning of the reading, and the rest just wasn’t coming.  So, I went out to the balcony to smoke a joint, looking for inspiration, and wrote something completely different.  Which was pretty good.  So, I have that, plus the other one that I’ve started and will finish in time.  That’s the whole point of the readings.  They keep me writing.