Process: Dancing Thoughts
This is what I usually call a running poem. I’m sure it has a real name, but that’s what I call it. Basically, it has a lot of rhyme, slant rhyme, alliteration, etc. but it doesn’t fit a particular meter. Usually when I write these poems, they represent running thoughts and mental illness. This one in particular is about anxiety and depression. That dichotomy of feeling like you have a million thoughts happening, but that none of them matter at all, so then why are they so scary?
The format of this one follows how my anxiety attacks usually go. There’s one initial thought, one sentence at the start. Then the thoughts get all whirled up in themselves. I use dancing as the metaphor here. Then the thoughts get so bad that you surrender to them. You let them dance and you lose sight of what they are, because you just want to survive them. That’s the knocking down part. And from there, you’re willing to sacrifice anything just to get through it. And you do. But you come out the other side exhausted with no answers. That’s why the last part of the poem rhymes so traditionally, because you’re out of the running thoughts.
I have two favorite parts of this poem. My first is “shock my atoms out of order”. I love this visual metaphor! I want to use this line or this idea again in future poems to be honest. I’m just really proud of it. My other favorite line is “I sacrifice my dancing feet and falling leaves and ranging tempest storms of need and everything that makes me me”. That’s because I came up with this all at once and I never edited any of it. It felt so perfect the first time I wrote it down.
All that being said, I didn’t explain HOW I wrote this poem. So let me tell you. I was basically in the middle of an anxiety attack and needed to distract myself, so I wrote a poem knowing it wouldn’t be that good. But I could polish it later. This is what I wrote:
“How can I be so full of everything and still feel so empty?
Thoughts dance through me, escalating, colors swirling lines are fading,
Tempos trending faster, lacking luster, then disaster
Feet are tripping, arms are whipping, bodies fall like leaves in piles, crowd in corners, crossing borders, shocking atoms out of order
Terse and simple, exclamation, vicious whispers, and lost sensation, a numbing cold in dim halation knock me down to steal my station
On the floor like leaves in piles with nothing more to slide inside, fill me up like snow in potholes, only ever cold
Waiting, panicked, winter ending, all along I’m just pretending
The sun erupts in heat and light I’ll sacrifice my dancing feet and falling leaves and raging tempest storms of need and everything that makes me me
The wounds I’ve felt
They’ve filled me full
But snow will melt
And leave a hole”
You can see that most of it made it into the final poem. That’s because I wanted to respect the thoughts and feelings I was having at the time. But I found that the original poem was mostly a lot of visualizations and thought fragments, so I wanted to make them make sense. That’s why I did the “As thoughts dance” lines to introduce stanzas. I feel like it helps ground the reader, so they can follow along with what is mostly just words that represent feelings. Still, I’m a little sad to take away some of the chaos of the original.