Magnetism

I’ve been playing with my magnetic words again.

Seven years ago, I was obsessed with them—magnetic poetry kits. I never bought a set for myself—people kept buying them for me because even then I was a writer, though at the time I hadn’t admitted it.

I have a reversible set with words on both sides so the meanings of the phrases one writes change with the flick of one’s wrist. I have a set from a game—every word-magnet includes its part of speech and point value. I have a Shakespearean set with words like “dost,” “thine,” and “forswear.” I have a set from a magnetic word calendar someone bought me one year. I don’t know how many sets comprise my collection. I do know the whole collection barely fits in its space on the faces of my kitchen cabinets, which are—happily—metal.

It’s funny how I never put them up or played with them during the last few years, even though I enjoy them so much. It must have been a function (dysfunction, more appropriately) of being in a relationship. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Relationships are bad, bad news for people who perform the solitary arts.

Now I write all over my refrigerator with them, ideas coming spontaneously, limited in unexpected ways by a word not present, expanded in more ways by the immediate availability of words I would never think to use otherwise. They force my brain to reach into dusty, unused corners and come up with alternatives.

Here are a few examples of my magnetic phrases (magnetic only literally—I’m sure they have no literary value outside of their place in generating a voluptuously creative mood and secret, lonely bliss):

Dreams do deceive the dreamer,
Bestowing the shimmer of stardust on this graceless life.

Man’s innocent but eager lips woo; then his lordship grows discontent
And, alas, under his codpiece nothing jumps.

Lust maketh melancholy morons of men
Lest eternity be too heavy with angels.

With soft skin you ripen
This cold bud;
The spring rain of your kisses
Makes me bloom out of season.

His velvet tongue pushed beyond the raw
Bruise that was his voice.
I smelled a fragile love beneath it,
Haunting desires,
Angry in their electric shame.
A tendriling tapestry of panic,
Romance, and destiny
Suffocates him, seduces me
Through my begging trust.

Slow, familiar branches of silence
Shadowed their daylight voices
Making every sound a shy romance
Awkward kisses in the cold
Their paltry magic dazzled them
So they did not see that beyond
Love’s smoke was fire.