i lost a poem, last night. just as i dotted it with a final i. i was using the old copy & paste into a google doc when i wrote the last line. but somehow, i dunno how, cuz perhaps i maybe l'idiot, i deleted it. since i primarily write using either my phone &/or my laptop & post many poems here on this blog, which i was attempting last night, poof! it was gone!
dagbladit!
i wrote it fast. trying to stay within the self-imposed limits of a time schedule. after the initial cussing & gnashing of teeth i thought fuck it all the way to hell. the poem is no worse for it being lost. i remember a few lines so perhaps i'll try again. but at the moment, grrrrrr!!!
for i really believe, & try to live by, poetry is not a career. it is not a job. it is a thing i do in my life. a way of life. poetry abides by life & life abides by poetry. if you adjust yourself according to its mad diktats for poetry does possess enormous power. & it can be a capricious art.
& but still it is an art, an ancient one at that, as old as human beings have taken a breath & expressed their wonder, anger, desires, titillations, appetites, pieties, stupidities etc etc. into song, into words, into language. it is, at least for this old punk & suburban NorCal boy it is the best thing, other than being a father & husband, in the very short years i have had to live on this small ball of a beautiful blue planet.
cuz sometimes i feel like caedmon when i look into the night sky & see, right now, jupiter. when i open the night sky app on my phone - oh man! - & see we have mapped the stars & planets in our solar system, we track space debris & our own satellites. & i want to sing as loud & as far as my breath can go.
there will be more poems as long as i have breath left. i lost one. i am still pissed at myself for losing it. hell, i'll chalk it up to my own kind of antipoetry. a kind of writing that doesn't get written! i'm good at not writing too!
