Usually, when I sit down to write, it is the same variations on the same basic habit. Sit at a table (diningroom table, coffeeshop table) with tea (cup, pot, several pots) and type. I will occasionally jot down lines by hand in one of many blank books I’ve accumulated over the years, sometimes when driving or biking, I’ll phone myself with a line or two that strike me, but usually it’s me, tea, table, type.

Another occasional way the words come is in my sleep. This happens more often than I actually can show work for it, not because it’s not good, but because I don’t usually succeed in waking myself up. My unconscious reigns the bed, and if words wake me, usually my unconscious lies to me and tells me that I will remember the words in the morning. I wake with the sun and remembering that I’d had every intention of remembering that story or poem.

Not last night, though. Almost a whole poem came to me around 3 am, enough for me to be able to muse on how the way I write affects what I write. Handwritten notes are so different from typed, and waking writings are so different from sleepwords.

These are the beginnings of what I wrote last night:

I remember the next line
the red line
the dark line
the swift line
the spark line

I live in the rooms of the next line
naked with this one arm
curved into darkness
I wander the empty boxes of this poem
the red line
the lost line
fingers searching bare closets
cobwebbed for clues
the next line.

It’s not done yet, obviously, as it’s a sleep-ridden first draft. Probably not even a full first draft, but it was interesting to read it upon waking and see how different it is from what I usually write.