Block that Box!

The writer - like many of us - will be the last person on earth to realize his or her work is done, that it is, to the extent of one's ability and human strength, complete, accomplished, and finished. This is one line of thought emanating from the central experience of having nothing to write. I cannot say I am blocked, as I have no particular push from within that suggests there is something to say which, owing to some psychological constraint or surplus, is not being said. I want to write and feel empty without it, but that is beside the point if I am simply an empty vessel.

Now - just to clarify one error - when I say "say," I mean write. I recognize the worlds of difference and the battlegrounds of say and write, and I honor those who serve this day, standing pike-to-pike with those who confuse speech and literacy. I think I do, anyway, and that is the point.

Another point I want to make is to indicate in a straight forward manner a few of my life's ironies. I compose in a box form. My father made a career in packaging. My boxes are poems; his boxes are boxes. My job - my paying career - is as a trademark paralegal. In my job, I assist the attorneys I work with to help clients obtain, register, and protect their trademarks - or, the words and design that indicate their goods or services; sometimes, often times, by labeling packaging and boxes with the trademark. I don't know if I unconsciously intended to please or surpass my father with these ramifying tactics. I perpetrated and awoke to these ironies, intact.

Other lines of thought are, in no particular order (though who can trust who on order): ideas are not poems, and poems are not ideas. There is no form in writing; there is form in having written. Writers who advertise a love of any given sport are not, simply not, being interesting or helpful to others or themselves. Absurdity is in the bones or it is nowhere. There is such a thing as loving someone to such depths that you have nothing to say on the subject. And, finally, poetry is as we found it. It is we who change.