Am I my own imitation?

The last sentence of the poem I wrote for Day 1067.

The mirror points in two directions.

It reflects me, my outside a stranger to me.

It lets me reflect, what I, think I see.

So, what is reflected?

Am I my own imitation?

I am not a poet. I write and talk about them everyday for the last 3 years, but I never took the time to find out what a poem is and how you should or could write one. I like juggling with the words and enjoy the minutes that it takes to make one. Because I have no deliberate structure while I write, it might happen that I sometimes make a sentence that sounds deep when I reread it. One of these sentences was the “am I my own imitation” from the poem above. I can’t recall if a started with a goal of where to go with that sentence or that I first wrote it down and then decided what the meaning could be.

Writing, and speaking to, is a strange thing if you think about it. How and where do the words you say come from, and why in that particular order? If I take speaking as an example, its a little clearer with that compared to writing. If you speak you don’t think about every word you are going to say, a lot of what you say seems to come out of your mouth automatically. You don’t make your sentences like: say hi…HI, say tree..no…how..HOW, say is…are…yes are…ARE…is it you or your?…you…YOU: you just say: Hi, how are you. This simple example hopefully shows that you most of the time speak without thinking, about speaking. This process goes automatically, probably because you use it so much in your life, but more complex sentences form also as if you had spoken them before, and only when you forgot a specific word or try to explain a complex subject you might struggle. The point what I want to make is that you speak with little thought besides the direction you want to go (and even that can be guided by your habits). With writing it is most of the time the same, the difference is that you can easier go back and change the way you want to say things.

With poetry, or art in general, there is some kind of “force” that steers the process. I think it is similar to what I wrote above, your words flow in conversation but also when you write a poem or paint or take a picture. Once the first sentences are written you can of course change words and undo what came out automatically. I think that great poets and artists know how to balance that process of “inspiration” and editing. I have the inspiration, I’ve been born with it, but I lack the editing skills and deeper knowledge of the words that I can choose from a language that is not my own.

But I like that last sentence even though the words written before it don’t really clarify it.