The Secret Notebooks Poem by Broken Shell

It started long before I was born.
Parents played music and wrote songs.

The life of a poet, the expression of ideas, feelings, moments, words
immortalized like a photograph for posterity.

The love I saw between my parents was the same love they gave to me.

My great escape was to write. I wrote stories and I wrote songs.

What a great gift it was to be able to write a love poem to a beautiful woman and see the effect it had.

Wrote lyrics for bands and music groups, even rappers.

Wrote worship songs for Jesus.

Wrote in almost every genre.

The writing most special to me was the writing done in the secret notebooks though.

Some of these, people will never see.

In my teenage years, I got into the beat poets after studying the
harlem poets earlier. There are too many others and most all the classics.

Spontaneous prose was such an escape, a world away, a real world!

This was the place where you could have zero obstacles between
what you felt and what you wrote.

You could create anything!

You could write stories, songs, poems, rhymed or not.

Symbolic imagery, similes, metaphors, narratives and so much more!

The speaker of the poem and the voice of the poem.

What a concept!

You can write your way into relationships and even write for money.

All these things are such a marvel and yet I love the place I'm revisiting now as I write these words.

The secret notebooks.