And where do you keep the jazz?
Where do you store the melancholy,
the self-reflection
and the escape.
Direct me to the place you keep
for your inner, your deeper,
your best kept back
and let's sit and explore,
let's jazz and coalesce
into a more honest
and more innovative
improv.

These are the ingredients for a poem. But like all recipes, you don't need every ingredient every time:

MUSIC
- beat, rhythm & rhyme
IMAGERY
- pictures painted
IMAGINATION
- describing what's not there.

STORY
- the narrative, the journey within the poem
STRUCTURE
- size & shape (line breaks and stanzas)

Also, you may have a inclination to use a particular ingredient to the exclusion of others - so as you recognise this, experiment with those ingredients which you are less confident about using.

Note
- the first three are where poets typically find their freedom to explore ideas within the poem;
- the last two are where the reader typically finds handholds / the anchor to better engage with the poem.

Big Art: The art of collaboration.

Big bouncing, cushioning,
resonating, in-phasing.

Small piece-by-piece-making,

patch-working, ingredienting,
combining, conjoining,
absorbing,

- collaborating.

These days we
last long enough to grow old
live long enough to reflect
but don't grow up enough
to bother.
Lord, save us from ourselves.

While smoking my mother's ashes
in my father's stale pipe
I felt a curious high, which was strange
- the rest of the batch had been expectedly bland

and homely. I walked the aroma through her discarded bungalow,
into the kitchen, out into the bare garden following the line

of the absent washing over the sunken stepping stones,
ending in the cul-de-sac of her rock garden of heather and herbs.

I sat on the concrete steps of the dismantled green house
letting the hit of the ash fill my lungs, holding it there

until it filled my head, before very slowly
breathing out the deep memory
of mum and dad, shouting and laughing and l allowed myself

to float above the colour of the border plants, up out of reach
of the childhood sprawl until I was back in her smoke filled room,
full of her emptiness - chin raised in silent prayer for one last breath.

And still gripping the warm bowl of my high, I sang her songs,
knees-up with the best of them and with mum on both arms, chin raised high

with a chorus of belief in family and friends and neighbourhood
and how this was never going to end well,

but meanwhile we'll have a party
making sure the whole street knows they're welcome
- and all the more if they have grief to smoke and memories to sing
- surely this is a life worth living.

Put another record on,
there's tea on the ***, ashes in our pipes
and songs to sing.

She took the crisp offered
- not for the flavour, but for the high offer
of a connection across the tallest table,
balanced on tall stools, with tall tales
that fired unfettered, unfiltered
from her so much taller son,
each word spittled with snorted laughter
as they floated in their isolation,
cushioned by a child's unhesitate honesty,
silky and cloud-light and nothing like her fears
which had continued to hover and to threaten
to sink her float and fade her laughter
and to let the dank win.
Instead she stayed afloat,
tethered only to her son's fingers
as they drew her further into his world,
pushing away her lost years,
floating her free to explore this genesis
of something like a second chance.

Kindness is not nice.

Nice is soft and inoffensive.
Nice is easy and effects no change, it's cotton wool - not stuffed tight, but just resting on the surface ready to be blown away or trodden into a muddy disinterest. Nice is a damp whisper, a mouse cowering in the corner, taking up as little space as possible, lest it be noticed, lest it presume too much and cause a whisker of offence.

Kindness isn't like that -

Kindness pushes in, claws out, quick and heavy, uninvited, unexpected, taking pleasure in disturbance, in leaving nothing unsaid and little undone in its pursuit of creating a disruption of difference. Kindness counts everyone a target, anybody a likely candidate for a three act matinee and evening performance of loud Kindness. Surprise is its currency, smiles its language, common humankindness its passport to lands yet to be explored, to vast red territories with drumbeats of gratefulness for the opportunity to march in with regiments of compassion and to leave a signature devastation of brutal Kindness.

Kindness is not 'nice'.
Kindness is loving awe-ful.