At the Cinema

I am at the cinema. The screen lights up. There are words on it and the words suddenly come alive. The words are dancing and spinning. Some are very bright, others flicker and fade out. Some are big and bold and take over. Others are happy to stay in the background, tiny and barely legible. Those are the important words, I am thinking. If I could only read those words, I would find out why I am here. At the back of my mind something is nagging, a faint memory, like a badly remembered tune. There is something familiar about the words dancing on the screen. It is as if they had once been mine, it is as if I had owned them once. Could I have written this? No, that is impossible. I don’t see myself in the movie any more. I have completely disappeared from this poem, I have faded out. These words are bold, free and independent. They have been loosened into the world. There is nothing I can do now to control them. I have become a mere spectator, one of the many people sitting in the dark room, watching the movie play out. I am nothing to this poem now.


These two poems are my assignment for How Writers Write Poetry, Week 3. They both speak about the same "incident", a crazy dream I had.