In Between Hours ~ Poetry & Process
Finding a way to create 'till the end of time.
Welcome to Writing Under the Palm Tree. This week, we discuss time and how it casts spells on us.
I always want more time than I have. I am still learning to settle into the richness of the minutes I carve out for myself.
In-Between Hours
I live in the in-between hours,
in the slices of time that come shimmering in silvery gray,
like shards of moonlight.
These handfuls of hours puddled in my hands will be different.
The tug, a continual continental pull to create from within,
will feel like love not loss,
when the words tear through my brown skin,
red slick and dripping,
their emergence will hurt solely in that instant.
I will, for once, not care what you think, and why you think it.
I will just create or I will not.
Then after I will not be haunted by the misgivings of regret.
I will not reset to yesterday,
only to find the hours puddled again there in my hands as silvery, mercurial blackness.
The hours shift and undulate.
They drip through my fingers becoming running rivulets of regrets
flowing through the ridges of my palm.
No, soon the words will come.
They will merge with the page
in a fusion of fuchsia
that gleams iridescent
but is not irreversible on white,
bleached,
blanched paper.
I may keep the words.
I may change them.
I may exist within them, or I may haunt them,
as they haunt me.
Me, a ghost among consonants and verbs,
similes and metaphors,
heartache and loss,
pleasure and pain,
isolation and rejection,
peaks and hollows,
yesterdays and tomorrows.
Today may be the day I fall in love with these in-between hours.
I may never find enough hours,
but I will find enough within the hours.
Olu Ayo, Dec. 5th, 2024In Process
As usual, an image appears to me first before anything else. In this case, it was a galaxy of stars passing by, each star is a minute. Each star blinks then dims, then darkens, as it streams by.
In writing this, I asked myself a series of questions.
What rises in me when I look at the clock and see my time dwindling, the time left to me before the day rears up hulking and hungry?
What is at the core of what I want to get done here and now?
What will give me much-needed perspective?
Then I write, re-write, and let it sit on the page. When I come back I wonder whether the words, their placement, their movement, their rise, fall, and recession are revealing the intangible experience I am trying to illuminate.
If not, I cut. Then replace words and let them run through the canals of my brain while away from the poem.
Hours, or days later I come back and see if the piece still holds its cantilevered shape over a chasm of potential misunderstandings, or if all of it, in the end, is a shambling mess.
This encapsulates a concise version of my creative process.
What is one thing that you’ve thrown into the mix of your creative process, and how has it shifted your thinking?
Share your thoughts, and takeaways from your creative journey. We need to support our creative community now more than ever.
As usual, I will leave you with an African proverb that I use to re-orient my headspace when I am in a scarcity mindset, scarcity of time, scarcity of resources, and scarcity of self-worth. I hope it brings you the same needed mind-shift.
A tree that cannot bend, breaks.
It took me decades to realize the pressure I felt to always be producing, to always be leveling up or scheming to level up, to never be satisfied, never be ok with rest, to ignore my mental health, to only succumb to rest when I have no choice and I’m running on fumes, was part of an intentional capitalist design.
Truthfully, rest followed by mindful creation, is something I still struggle to practice with fidelity.
My hope for you is that you are that tree that is so deeply rooted in your own inner strength, your particular brilliant brand of creative magic, that whatever unrealistic, toxic expectations around who you should be, what you should’ve accomplished, what happiness should look like for you, blow against your trunk and you bend but never break, in fact, you spring back stronger and more resilient, you rule your own life, and live life on your own terms.
I am doing the work, and making the creative, social, and financial shifts to get to that point, I hope you can as well.
In solidarity,
Olu
Beautiful, Olu. I’m so glad I found you.
This. This was powerful and beautiful. Thank you!