It’s been a long time since I’ve put fingers to keyboard in service of creative writing. Too long and I don’t really know what to write here. I write for work, and while challenging, and creative in problem solving and working on teams, it doesn’t really provide an outlet for making something new.
I’ve collected some various prompts and images in the last few years. Kids were born, bought a house. Life continued, which should provide plenty of material to generat-icise new poems.
I even have the start to a chapbook that I haven’t looked at in… at least two years.
One line I have written down is
This poem will piss you off.
I think it’s supposed to be in the voice of the president. But I can’t even see through my own anger to start writing it. I have no distance.
I have pictures of various atrocities. But again, I have no distance.
There is a way in which my jaw has not unclenched in almost four years. Longer than that, I guess.
There’s a need to pull it out of the gut like gutting a fish it should be messy and a little gross and inelegant. Righteous hellfire wrath were faith still important. Though it’s all some people have they’ve swallowed the hook. There is not a pretty way to exorcise that barbed point.
There are old photo albums at my mom’s house that we all looked through on Mother’s day recently. Pictures from when I was about my oldest son’s age. And am I completely surprised by how much me and my brother are reflected in pictures of my two sons.
So it’s not all anger and frustration.
Mess and making
These posts are not planned out. They are messy, and I’m allowing them to be messy. Maybe in being messy they’ll make something mew. New. Maybe they’ll make something NEW.
The boys couldn’t agree on what kind of muffins to make today, so we have two kinds of muffins to eat now. I don’t even like muffins. I like cookies. The oldest one ate all of the cookies today.
I’m not even upset about it, even though he had plenty of muffins he could have eaten.
Part of having a sick parent is you have to go over there. Or maybe it’s I’m lucky enough to live close enough to go over there and help. It’s been a lot better lately, but at first it was not. At first it was more like having to help with things the nurses had to do at the hospital.
Home health care is not really a thing in this country. They came twice a week for the first two weeks out of the hospital, which were also the first two weeks of stay-at-home orders.
I don’t want to share too many details.
It was really difficult and at least I had the experience of watching my wife give birth and cleaning up after newborns and toddlers. At least I had the Marine training to do what needs to be done no matter what. But you don’t want to have to apply that experience to a parent.
The human body is amazingly resilient with the right doctors.
I should keep writing, but I think I’m done with this post.
Allow things to be messy, push boundaries to that next step where you’re about to fall over. Everything else has been pushed there already, embrace it.
Make something new.