picked up a cold somewhere so now my head feels like it is a 100 pound weight filled with brillo pads and my nose is scraped raw from the rough caress of tissue.

to top it off, that's it. don't feel terribly bad, plenty of energy. what gives. well, it sure beats last year when i must've endured half a dozen colds, including one that felt like goons from the sopranos worked me over with a couple of 2x4s for a couple of hrs.

wondering what the source of poetry is for most poets. i mean, it seems that many writers come to poetry out of some traumatic event in their lives. i don't mean to suggest all writers, but on the surface there seems some connecting thread of illness or bad happenstance early in their lives that leads to poetry.

so is poetry sourced in pain and trauma, or can a writer live a happy life and write well too? for me reading/writing is the site of tremendous pleasure. but it is episodic, that pleasure. like sex. at least the writing of it. long preparations lead to anticipation lead to the act lead to an hr or so of sustained work lead to a refractory period, whereby the process begins again. sometimes there are marathon sessions. sometimes a few minutes only of solid work.

and yet when it is done, the poet is the one who is continously thinking about the next writing session, the preparation that leads to anticipation and so on. everything, everything is fuel for the writer.

it never ends. like human language, like human desire. but does that pleasure declare as its source the site(s) of trauma, illness, stress and the like. so that writing becomes such a pleasure because it is an action out of, and thus opposite of, mute suffering?