When I first started to write, I approached it much like a child with eight different colors of finger paint, and an unending supply of paper (and a patient parent standing by to clean up the inevitable mess).

Only words were my colors. I didn’t write stories at first, but poems. Most of them were free-form, because I knew nothing about poetic meter and rhyming. I loved to experiment with words, to see how they fit together to make unique, and often odd and discordant, pictures.

One of my other blogs is called “My Writing Sandbox”. Although I don’t write poetry much anymore, I still see letters and words as my toys, my building blocks if you will, and my blogs are my sandbox where I get to create. Sometimes I write for the fun of it, and often to keep me sane, but always to better understand people, the world, and myself.

I took a writing class in high school where we studied all forms of poetry including iambic pentameter (http://iambicpentameter.net). The poem I wrote for the class (well over 30 years ago) I still remember:

Yellow, yellow through the rainbow.

Color, color in a tight row.

Blue and red and orange yellow.

Makes this rainbow not too mellow.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment. — Carl Sandburg