This semipublic writing is similar to the 19th century automatic writers who, entranced, received their writing flow from the dead, the ether, or the mouths of gods. My sister left a phone message - writing is difficult for her, she says. She wonders if I write with flow, effortlessly, fluidly. I leave a phone message where I say that writing comes out in a flood but that does not make it good writing, only a place to start, that writing well is difficult for me too, that the fact she finds it hard means she cares about it. I receive a second phone message in which she says her boss writes "like you do" fluidly and that it is crap. I think I've been slapped. In our family we were raised to believe that people who do things do those things because those things are easy for those people to do. Once we found the thing easy for us to do we would happily float off to do it. In the meanwhile, it was not fair that all these other people were effortlessly out there doing whatever we might like to do but, alas, found difficult. I have not called my sister back.

I like playing at the morning poem, the glib fluidity of its unjudged coming into being. I don't think it is a poem, particularly. It is fun to free associate and see where my mind wanders. This rapid process pleases me. This is an engine rev, an "Italian tune up" as my husband used to say, gunning the car engine. It isn't so much functional as fun. What the hay.

Effortless Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

Lucille Ball and Harpo Marx in swallowtail coats could ape
each other's any move as I watched them before I was Gam-
ache, when TV and Laura Ingalls Wilder were what I cried
about when I admitted that I cried. Socks slipped, wore burs
I didn't know where I got them, Lucille and Harpo so fluid
in black and white. I would have given up my colors to be
one with or of them, the couch safe with nobody home.

Africa was the dark continent, I cut its elephant ear
over and over, painted it orange, painted it green,
edges curled under by poster paint, plaster of paris
Washington state chalk white from rubber mold
flipbook cubes pencilled one by one to a huge cube
repetition the comforting rule. I laved my skills one
after the other did not have to think nor listen nor be.

Where would you hide if we were under seige?
We crouched under our desks in the room corner
that sixties wall of class windows threatening
that hard rain gonna fall, that hurricane, what
must have been the Bay of Pigs. South Florida.

I did not love Lucy so perpetually tripping into
trouble I tiptoed away from. She was brazenly
wrong and mouthy and unfazed by what lay me
flat in doses one one hundredth what she took
and stood and blundered through again and
again, themesong swimming under my door.