This is What a Title Looks Like

This is not an occupy  or Occupy or "OCCUPY" posting. This is not the opposite of an occupy posting. Now I have put occupy in our heads. I do not want to spend the whole rest of the posting dispelling the aroma of occupy. I apologize for my clumsy beginning, which threatens to barrel roll toward a shattered mess. It is a mess. I will not occupy a mess. I will not be responsible for inflicting a mess on you, a friend - I assume only a friend would read this far.

I am into four pages - 28 three-line strophes - of a poems that I am determined will not simply resolve in any way to which I am accustomed, while neither being the opposite of resolution. So, I am interested and concerned but dissuading myself from a patrician's role, perhaps. The impetus is a resolved desire to write, to produce, come what may. To actively represent before myself the fact of having worked which will lead to more books, of which the world can never have enough.

And why not. Here I am training for a religion where biscuits are made flesh in the twinkle of an eye so to speak. Surely I can manage to keep writing poetry.

But this has been a long road. I would say I have been working toward sufficient peace of mind to write with hope for a few years now. I have produced, at times, but it has been against the grain of difficult, even unconquerable anxieties and doubts - not merely of my role as a poet but as a human being; even then, I am underselling the sheer labor of approach. I will not go into details as I am incapable of the narrative.

I think I could occupy (oh.) every day merely reminding myself of what I should not forget to do. For instance, looking at my old books. Here is Blue Aluminum Curtain, a 20 page poem I wrote on the coast, when we lived in Wheeler, OR, back in - 1998? I think so. I haven't looked at it for years, having in mind my impressions. Looking now, I have new impressions. This too was written in a waterfall of three-line strophes - 100 in total. This is one thing I will leave behind, I think to myself, besides the feelings and memories of family and friends. It is a nice little book, and who am I to doubt the author? His motives were noble and I should know. I see no contradictions to contravene kindness. We can move on relatively unsullied - buoyed perhaps. That is a kind of choice.

I am grateful I can publish as I do, if you can call it that. Self publication is a misnomer really - it is not publication, it is recordal. Self-recordal, or confession, or balloting. What I do is not what most people do or should or shouldn't do. It is what I do.

My way of doing whatever it is leads to some strange behaviors and non-participations. I sometimes feel like a Friday at the beck of a Crusoe who is also myself. I alternate in odd patterning treks, rites, feasts and famines almost half-blind, surrounded by an insensible sea. I do in fact ache to hear news from myself; failing that, I build a fire. It is two days later and I have done nothing, but then there are no guideposts or demands that I do anything. One or another of us, master or servant, examines our heart and resolves to work for the sake of work and to give thanks for what is ours by choice of being ours.

This is one way to write.

Covering Attentions & Thrift by Sound

A feeling of settlement. Trust in the perimeters, what I have built and natural limitations. Interest, energy, resources, desire - the characters that make up a cohort.

The daily routine leading to productions. Review, discussion, plans, building. A person of importance is visiting next week - or a special event. Put away the tools, cover the workings.

The surprise is continuing, today. Friends like bird song for the peace and kind attentions governed by their silence.

Monuments in small ways, or markings. To be gathered for a fire or incorporated into other, larger works. To be used and reused. Or as implements for fracture; set on an end , they serve as shovels.

A shower curtain, a lawn chair. A stand-in friend for a man or a woman, a child, seasoned by spirits.

At the outside is dawn and rattling cans. Feet into socks into shoes into the day. The snap of a flag in a sharp, unpredictable wind.