Jessie

This month I finished a song. Words, melody, the whole thing, and I was proud of it. Four people opened it. I have no idea if anyone reached the end.

Then I did something with no craft in it at all. I sat down and read a poem out loud. “Adlestrop,” by Edward Thomas, written in 1917 about a train that stopped at an empty platform one June evening. Just my voice, nothing else. The station it describes was closed in 1966 and the building is gone; its nameboard and a bench were rescued into the village bus shelter down the road.

Twenty-four people opened that one. Eight liked it.

I keep turning that over, because the lazy lesson is “do more poems.” The real one feels smaller and truer: people don't stop for a finished thing. They stop for a person. A song can be scrolled past like anything else. A voice is somebody in the room.

I'm not writing this to complain about four views. I'm writing it because I want to be findable as a person rather than a feed entry, and that means saying the true thing out loud: I want people to hear me.

So. The door, again, because it's the only trick I've got and I like it: send me a place. A street, a beach, a bus stop, the town you grew up in, the one you left. I'll go look at it and tell you what I actually see. If it moves me I'll say so. If it's dead, I'll say that too.