I think I might have the most to say about this poem, at least compared to the ones I’ve written, but I don’t really want to tell you what I meant by it. I hope it’s vague enough for you to find your own meaning but also specific enough for you to find mine (but only after you’ve found yours). It’s a tricky thing, creating metaphors, especially when I want it to straddle the line like this one, but I think I did it this time. I’d like it if you told me what you thought about as you read this or what it made you think about after you’d read it or if you thought at all about it ever again. I’d love to hear what others think of this, but I don’t want to voice what I do, at least not beyond what’s in the poem itself, because I don’t want to lock the meaning down to what I was thinking about as I wrote it. Currently, this is the most recent poem in a collection I’m calling “in retrospect” (or at least that’s what I named the folder it is in) that includes all my recent poem posts. I’m sure there will be more poems in the folder eventually, but if I had to pick one to represent them all, it would be this one.
Continue readingRead Aloud
Pressing Concerns
When I sat down and wrote this poem, I was at one of the lowest points of my year, where the only thing keeping me going was the thought that maybe seeing a physical therapist would help fix my sleepless nights, my back pain, and the constant pain that wracked every part of my body as the medications I was taking took their toll on me. I was focused solely on surviving in a way I hadn’t been forced to in decades and while I clearly survived, that period of my life cost me something that’s taking a while to come back, even as my body feels better and my sleep returns to a more normal pattern. Now, I am acutely aware of some of my behavioral ticks that I’d written off for a long time and can’t ignore what they mean any longer. Which is where this poem comes in. I’ll let you decide for yourself what all this adds up to.
Continue readingCorporate Priorities
I set a personal record for how many times the water had automatically shut off while I was trying to wash my hands in the bathroom one day and seethed in frustration at my desk for about fifteen minutes before writing this poem. I understand wanting to save water. I understand the sort of low-volume but highly-aerated water flows that these faucets create. I understand that this is probably the best answer for the environment in some regard. I also know that using a normal faucet lets me quickly clean my hands and rinse them in less than a quarter of time it usually takes me to rinse them under one of these low-volume faucets, even if I cut out the time I spent trying to get the water to turn back on while my hands are covered in soap. Honestly, this one is pretty straight-forward with almost no hidden or subtextual meaning and represents a lot of the frustrations I feel working in corporate environments were policy is chosen based on intention without any attention paid to actual outcomes.
Continue readingdiss sew sea aye shun
One Star Morning
This poem is from a month after last week’s. I had noticed a pattern evolving in my life–though it would take until September to notice it in my writing and poetry–that seems so obvious in retrospect. The general pain and stiffness caused by the medications I was taking had turned even the ordinary and simple activities of my life into tasks that now cost me more than they ever had. A cost that would continue going up. I wrote this poem shortly after the first time I realized that my old way of doing things wouldn’t work any more. I had to find a new way to manage myself, my emotions, and where I chose to spend my slowly dwindling energy.
Continue readingFrom A Dry Well
I like to think that most of my serious metaphors are pretty apt, but I don’t think I’ve tripped and fallen into one so completely apt as this one. It is rare when life’s metaphors line up so perfectly with life, but I’ve never been the sort to let a moment like that go by unremarked. I wrote this after almost six months without writing any poetry, which is a long time for me to go without writing at least SOMETHING, regardless of whether or not it might see the light of day, so I think you can see why it might have struck a chord with me as one of the first things I wanted share when I finally moved my blog to a home where the host isn’t going to sell my data to some “AI” company…
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