And so the night is spent hacking at poetry.
There are brief flashes of inspiration, illumination - a clever reinterpretation of similar sounding words, a line that trips off the tongue, but that's where it ends.
Otherwise there are long lists of words and ideas that have to be integrated into the whole - a sentence isn't a stanza, a stanza isn't a poem...
The 99 % perspiration.
Flashes of illumination that might encompass, say, 4 or 5 lines, they're rare. Rarer than poems. And so you take the little flashes and assemble them like pearls on a string. There are gaps, sure, but they can be filled in, it's important that things are in order.
It's still gold, these little gems and epiphanies, but the process needs to be worked upon so it becomes more consistent, simpler.
The big flashes, they'll come, I'm new to this, or if not new it's been a while, and so the flashes so far are brief, they'll get longer, long enough to write entire verses, poems, in a sitting, for the moment I have to be patient.