My friend Jordan Chaney is a poet with a calling.
I don’t know too many poets and I don’t read too many poems. I’m really more of a prose kinda girl. The only other poets I’ve been this blown away by in my lifetime are Sylvia Plath and Bob Dylan, quite honestly. So I get excited when Jordan writes poems, and this particular one is deep for me, because it is about SOLITUDE. In fact, Jordan wrote this in response to a creative dare I gave him to write about solitude (see: Creative Truth or Dare) and he indulged me when I begged him to let us publish it on Recovering Yogi. I don’t want to steal Recovering Yogi’s thunder, do I won’t republish the entire poem here, but a glimpse:
Solitude to me is an empty and rusted canteen in the desert whose threaded lips beg the cactus for a sip, a kiss. Solitude is a kiss puckered and blown at no one into the thin air where echoes hide, in between the ribs of the wind, and it howls because it is hollow where it longs to be full. It’s a broken mirror, like puzzle pieces that are all one color and scattered playfully over the span of time and all over the vastness of the universe, waiting for the lone traveller to collect its shards and realize its awe-striking reflection is found in everything. Solitude is a joyful swimmer floating on his own back in a sea of his own tears—it can be rest.
Le sigh.
Read the rest on Recovering Yogi.
If you want your own creative dare, rest assured that I have plenty of them up my sleeve, none of which will necessarily require you to be a gifted professional poet like Jordan. Most of the creative dares I give at Creative Truth or Dare are meant for normal people. Or for people like you. TRY IT. You (probably) won’t be sorry.
