too early to brush your teeth
but not too late to edit a dream
it’s nowhere time

dawn is bubbling away outside
a fertile nothing
floats around the bed

poems ferment in a hollow mouth
a wandering ear
an earthen jar

a spot in a mushy mind
stretching
for a constellation

hovering like a scoby
growing itself inside the leathery
luxury of limbo

all you need to catch a poem
is willing eyes, broken ears,
fingers, and a sieve

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pic and poem by rachel mcalpine cc by 2.0

For NZ National Poetry Day, 25 August 2017, a poem about poems: poets can’t help doing this sometimes. What’s a scoby? A slimy, ugly, living organism that creates kombucha out of sweetened tea. Like a ginger-beer bug, you know.

And the scoby of all poems is … space, silence, that mysterious state of hypnogogia. For the last two months I have been dead to creative enterprises. Now we’re sorted, I hope, so it’s time to cut down on external stimuli and enjoy the magic of my own mind.

You can tell I’m an introvert, although I pass as normal. Lots of poets do.

Hypnogogia, the state between sleep and wakefulness, is key to creativity — Huffington Post