Welcome to my Poet Lady Chat Room. I would like to invite you to click on the chat box and type in a question, a suggestion, submit a poem, in other words – “chat with me.” I may, if you submit a poem, decide to feature it in my Poem of the Week section or, we may simply exchange ideas and suggestions about your poem.
This is a place to “talk” poetry with someone who has loved it all her life. I have a true passion for the possibilities of poetry and would love to hear your thoughts and/or read your poem. I will be happy to offer my reaction to your work and, based on over 40 years of teaching poetry, organizing, and conducting poetry workshops, working as a book review editor for an international poetry magazine, authoring five books of poetry and two textbooks on teaching poetry, send along my thoughts on ways to make your poem stronger and more impactful.
If you’re on my site, you have a connection to poetry. Feel free to connect with me – right here -right now, by typing your message into the “chat box” and clicking send. I’m waiting…
Your friend in poetry, Susan
FEATURED POEM
To stand in a room of faceless screams,
To reach out for hands with no fingers,
To cry out to these soulless veiled figures.
And I keep trying to run, run away, but why
are my legs chained? Chained to nothing.....
Maybe if I plead they would let me run.
But to whom do I plead? Where did they go?
Those...those faceless figures, weren't they
right here(where?) staring hungrily into my eyes?
Sucking the last essence of truth from me?
(what truth are they searching for? what truth
do I hold? what is it that I know?)
O! help me! They seem to be chasing me.
Yes, I am running. But my legs are chained
but the chain never seems to pull me. (Am
I really chained? Are these chains real?)
I can't see them anymore. Those hooded figures.
Maybe this silence is consuming me. Maybe
I am a slave to this nothingness. My thoughts
seem to scream to me. (Whisper, please.) My
thoughts are not mine. They....they are being
conferred to me. Whose thoughts are these?
They are here. The soulless monsters.
Take my voice. My thoughts. My soul. Spare
my sanity. Spare my identity. Spare me the truth
of knowing that you never existed. You aren't
real. (But why do they seem real? Like humans.)
Allow this void to consume me. I will sell my
dreams to you. Give you my hopes. (Hopes?)
Let me out. Let me out from this chained place.
Let me out. And I keep pleading to those red
hooded soulless figures. But I am chained.
I am chained and my voice isn't mine....