The Poet's Mantle

How raw poetry feels to me after such a long absence.
I try to remember my old poems but fail sadly. I try to catch them in the wind but they have been rescued by birdlings and will no longer be seen.
So I rest in the memory of a kinder time when I could write of strange things and still be happy.
Now, I want to scribble words with a pencil. I want to carry a notebook once more as I haven't done for years. I want to sit in a quiet room with a heavy brocade curtain, listening to Callas firing an aria in the background. I want the curious rain, peeping cautiously through the window, to watch my mood. And the tea from the pot to stay unfinished. I want a dusty old painting from somewhere in the shadows to smile down indulgently. Oh the picture? Funny old man downing vodka in a nightdress! All this as I bend my head down to write, pretending an industry I feel rather bashful of.
I pray my clumsy house of cards built from these budding dreams, will not topple. And if it does, that toy soldiers will summon a battle to save it.
Isn't it funny. The laptop will not do...nor the pen but I want to bite of my pencil stubs and chew carefully on old rubbers as i write untidily all down my page. A very bad habit. I never follow lines.
I remember the odd eccentricity with Rozanav in Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil. The philosopher himself had a craving for pencils, using a different one each day, with which to make thoughtful notes. How such a character would nourish my humour. When I picked up the book at the library years later, Murdoch could just as well have written about me, thousands of miles away at the time, I too had the same unnerving passion and a similiar assortment of coloured pencils from where I would experiment with my verse.
Which is a crazy way to appreciate a novel but then isn't fact stranger then fiction.
I like my clumsy poetry and I like my funny stubby pencils and I like where this winding road is taking me. Only I musn't spill the tea.