I used to write a great deal of poetry, but all that inspiration, that spark that comes to me has of recent years been funneled into fiction.  The start of a poem was like a whip crack of inspiration, and then I had to try to find the words to follow it up.  I'd chase an idea around and around, hoping to do that first glimmer justice, most often not.  But I loved writing poems.  I also like the way I can focus on all the words of a poem at once, everything so there, right in front of me.  With novels, I am scrolling, scrolling, trying to find the place where he says, "I hate that damn dog."

I use the ctrl + F, and end ups seeing the 450 times I wrote the word dog.  Finally, finally!, the conversation I am looking for, and I can't remember what I needed it for in the first place. Novels are so long that  the characters change hair color and speech patterns in 300 pages, and I'm smoothing and smoothing and filling for as long as I was writing the thing.

With a poem, I do that work, too, but it's all right there, this thought in one tasty (or not so) morsel.

Yesterday, I had the whip crack of inspiration and it had no business in my novel, a place where no one is having a hysterectomy.  I can't just work it in.  My character is not going to pull over on the 75 freeway and say to her companion, "I really have the urge for a hysterectomy."

So I wrote a poem.  The whip crack is the title.  I don't know if I did it justice, but I had a good time trying.

Vagina to Nowhere

It used to go somewhere

mysterious, in, up.

Beyond its doors,

life grew or tried to grow each month,

but no matter the condition,

something was happening,

the body busy, useful, needed

beyond pleasure, organs and parts that

could endure the harshest pain, the largest

child, a system that could resist

a flow that seemed never ending,

especially toward the end when a period

was not a period but a season.

Now it’s the vagina to nowhere,

tied up, its cut slit like the dead cartoon

characters, X’s for eyes.

It’s a false start, a finger of entrance,

a useless cavern of confused flesh.

What am I supposed to do? it asks

every month as somewhere above,

ovaries spin to the same nothing, pushing

out eggs that float like deserted astronauts,

the dark abdomen an unforgiving universe.

I used to know where I ended and began. 

I used to know the middle, too, the place

where the energy came from. 

But that place is nowhere and gone,

everything ending

in a way it never began.