Where should one look for words?

We have been told that we have to keep waiting for the idea to come, keep biding your patience, keep staring at your blank paper for time, keep scribbling down empty words and then strike them out like a fierce enemy…and sometimes the ideas come in the midst of it all and sometimes it does not come at all, for days and for hours and you die in ennui, you wait with something else in your hand, you keep reading and sometimes the idea does not come at all. But for ideas to come you have to keep looking for them, not where people look for them, look where people have discarded them, look like the gypsy does in the garbage dumps, look for dead words, for a writing to begin so many words have to die, so many words have to be discarded, words which like lovers were making pronouncement of their love, hoping to cling on us for eternity, they have to be left alone, they have to be stacked in numerous diaries for some other time or for never at all….and yet when you look at the dumps, you start discarding some too, for some one to pick up, not on your words but on your discards…read the originals, see why a word was discarded, what could have been done with it, see the word to its ultimate destination, why when it started it could not reach where it wanted to go, what stopped it in the hands of the writers and why do some words just travelled together? What kind of stories did they tell each other or where they like mute companions on a long journey just admiring each others’ beauty like a couple who meet for the first time after numerous correspondences, after knowing each other for a long time? What did they do to each other? Did they get to know each other much better or did they leave it for another time? Did that time ever come? Or where they like mute strangers just sharing the early morning news paper and in being polite asked you if you would like to have a cup of tea or share their morning snacks? Did they talk to you about politics or ask you where you belonged to and what did you do in life? Did the words come alive when they wandered outside the windows of the train or did they complain for the train running late? What happened? Or was it all being scribbled in a diary which no one will read or they kept their neck lost in the pages of a book?

4:00 pm, 24/01/2013

Rome 

Writing a poem

Writing a poem was rummaging through

Words, looking for them in the discarded thoughts of the

Beggar on the corner of the red light, in the lighting of the

Smoke in an unknown bar at the end of the street, in the

Frowns of a lover with love unfulfilled, in the empty

Meanings of the street sign. Words; look for them in the

Garbage dumps, where people leave them like unsmoked

Tobacco, like an empty bottle after a heavy night of drinks; look

For them like the destitute looks for a home under every ceiling,

Under a deserted shrine; in a forgotten death. Look for them

Like a beggar rummages patience in empty garbage cans

To turn over fruits of leftover hands, yet day in and day out

They keep turning over. Keep looking.