Autumn Bartle
First Drafts
I’m an editor
An overthinker
Everything I do is planned down to the word
To the syllable
For every hour spent writing
Days, weeks scrutinizing each word like a detective
With you, though
There’s no room to overanalyze.
I can’t be the critic for art in progress
What is still unfolding so beautifully before me
Like the map of this is where I belong
I just create. I just live. I just write.
That’s the beauty of us,
We’re beautiful as my first drafts are
Haphazardly spilled onto receipts and napkins in my glovebox
Yet carved into my mind for evermore.
You and I, we create stories together
Synthesize memories that will live within
My leather-bound life
For years to come.
I love us as I love my water-stained ideas,
That strike me while driving or sitting in a classroom.
We are so new that I know nothing except writing our story. Fresh.
You are the thread binding together each moment of my life,
You are the crisp white of a page untouched,
The freshly-fallen snow of my heart’s deepest beliefs
What’s unedited is unharmed.
Our story is one of scribbles of ink rather than crisply typed lines
You are the beauty of a messy first idea, of a dog-eared page
Of each papercut lining my fingertips.
You are my art
The feeling so striking I must drop everything to write you down
The bedside sheet of 2 a.m. inspirations never to see the light of day
The stanza, the metaphor so lovely I scrap the whole poem just to keep you.
You are the beauty of writing.
You are why some thoughts are so beautiful
That grammatical sentences just cannot sum them up.
You are the beauty of writing
And together, we make my favorite sonnet,
The enjambment in the aubade of our lives.