Meds, poetry, and crystal creatures

I know, what a subject line, right? Believe it or not, it fits this post. As many of you know, I’ve had vivid dreams from as far back as I can remember. A few of those dreams have ended up inspiring plot points or even entire novels (the Night Huntress series started from a dream, in fact.) Because of this, I’ve learned to keep a notepad and a pen close to my bed because if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night after being struck by inspiration, I want an easy, convenient way to write the idea down. I am simply too lazy to stagger around looking for paper at two or three in the morning, and this had led to more than once where I’ve woken up and realized that I’ve forgotten what, in my sleep-addled state, I was sure was a winning idea.

Add in the other fact about me that many of you probably also know: I suffer from migraines. Nothing to worry about, it’s hereditary, and one of my go-to migraine medications is Maxalt. Now, Maxalt has the benefit of being non-narcotic, but it has the disadvantage of making me very loopy. My friends calls it my Zombie pill because of how it affects me.

Well, yesterday, I had a migraine and before bed, I gave up on Tylenol and took a Maxalt. Cue my mostly being able to sleep, but with my mind spinning from a combination of my already-strange subconscious along with the effects of the Maxalt. Add in a childhood memory of the first poem I’d ever written, and you have me staggering out of bed at who-knows-what-hour to write down my inspiration to amend a problematic line from said poem.

Let me explain, but to do so, we need to rewind the clock back to when I was twelve years old. So, picture pre-teen Jeaniene, watching my mother about to dust a spider web off of the living room chandelier – watching, not helping, mind you, because again, I am lazy. In that moment, I was struck by literary inspiration for the very first time.

“Stop!” I told my Mom. “Don’t ruin his web. That’s the spider’s home!”

I don’t know what my mother replied. Probably a version of “Well, it’s my chandelier, so the web goes” because really, who wants to live in a house filled with spider webs?

The spider web vanished under her dusting cloth, but the inspiration stayed, and I went to my room and wrote the very first thing I’ve ever written. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that it turned out to be more of a mini story than a poem, and a paranormal story at that because I wrote it from the perspective of the spider. As you’d expect, it wasn’t very good (I’m still a bad poet to this day, although I still enjoy writing poetry) and it also had a glaring grammatical error that I didn’t realize at the time because, well, I was twelve. When I realized the error in my teens, I tried to amend the poem, yet couldn’t because I could not think up another line that rhymed while still being consistent with the poem’s rhythm.

Well, last night at age forty-two, that line finally came to me, and I wrote it down before stumbling back into bed. Because seeing it and remembering this poem made me smile when I woke up, I am now sharing it with you. I am able to do so only because I put that poem in a binder folder and gave it to my grandmother when I was twelve. Decades later, when my mother and I were going through my grandmother’s belongings after her death, I found that binder folder and thus the poem. My grandmother had kept it all of those years.

The poem is called Crystal Creatures.

Inside the world of a chandelier,

a tiny silk web lay.

Lodged firmly in between the lights

at its center, a spider stayed.

He was very young and very scared,

for this was his first web.

He should have been catching all sorts of bugs

but only caught dust instead.

So he checked all his threads

to make sure they’re secure

and even smeared on some more glue.

Despite all his efforts,

his web remained empty

and he didn’t know what else to do.

He went to his neighbor from across the lights

to ask for some helpful, friendly advice.

But all that he got for his time and his trouble

was an angry reply that he leave, on the double!

Beaten now, he crawled back in shame,

deciding to move to the nice window pane

when all eight legs stopped

and his chelicerae dropped.

In the corner of his silvery web

a tiny bug struggled in a silken-glue bed.

He scurried on over as fast as he could

and looked down on the proof that all had worked as it should.

Quivering with triumph,

he rolled up his meal

and added more glue for a proper, tight seal.

Then he crawled to the middle of his thread-woven bed

and laid down to rest his tiny, proud head.