Sweet Sleep

Sweet sleep
I need you, I know,
Sweet sleep
I know I need you
when my face feels the pillow
Sweet sleep
you wash away the wants and wishes
Sweet sleep
you are the place I need to go
Sweet sleep

This is from Many Different Kinds of Love. If you want to write poems you could take this poem and do one, some, all or any of these things:

1) write some more lines and use my chorus ‘sweet sleep’.
2) make up a new chorus like ‘lovely cake’ or ‘cool water’ or ‘hot day’ or ‘crowded corridor’ or any chorus you like.
3) did you notice how some of my lines repeat sounds like ’n’ and ‘kn’ in lines 2 and 4? Well, actually I repeat the words ‘I know’. I also repeat sounds in line 7 – wash away the wants and wishes’. And line 2, line 5 and line 9 rhyme: ‘know’, ‘pillow’ and ‘go’. All this makes the poem ‘musical’. You could imitate this by making your poem musical by repeating sounds and words. This ‘holds’ a poem together and makes it a bit like a song.
4) if you started to think of anything at all when you read my poem, jot down what you thought. It need only be a word. Or two words. Or three words. If these words make you think of more, just put them down on the line below. See what happens if you go on doing that for as long as you feel like doing it. It’s what we call ‘free writing’. It might be to do with sleep, or anything else that comes to mind. Maybe when you’ve finished, it’s a poem! Or maybe you might want to play with the words. You can try to make them more musical. Or you might want to make some of them rhyme. Whatever you think makes it say what you want it to say.
5) You could make up some music to go with your poem. Turn it into a song. If you like doing that, you could make up a tune for my poem too!