A Brief Retrospecitve

I dig into my old poetry between laundry and a cocktail, hoping to find some inspiration. Maybe a glimpse of the past will mask these grinding emotions with a little perspective. They always twinkle on the screen as though fresh off my mind. Still I expect them to be frayed or tattered. A bent corner. A forgotten line. A little age. They ought to embody the time that's passed and the moods that've come and gone. They stay fresh; blacks crisp and whites clean. The emotions get the treatment—watered down and softened in a spin cycle that never stops. Tumbled brilliant like stones until the image is all that remains. Until they're metaphors and not tirades. All my vitriol is gone and the art remains.

There are visions of a man who loved like a falling stone. No conviction, no remorse. Heedless of his own motion. The shape of things is a dog song—pain and joy so subtle and too strong to comprehend. The poetry screams out like madness at the sight of some dark god. Who was I? What did I see as I launched myself from every precipice, and did I even imagine the ground below?

Though with time there is a pattern. A clear one of glory-seeking and empty vessels. He becomes the rock. He is blind. He is thoughtless. He becomes the dog. He replies with barking and with sex. Then something magical happens. In those pages (the ones most yellowed and aged in my mind) he learns who he is. He blinds himself with a mask of imagery. He wears the poem, and puts it on. He erects straw-man gods to do his dirty work. It's beautiful, but maddening. A patchwork of prediction and delusion. A back seat driver in the verse.

I used to say I never journal. But it seems I may have done something even more explicit.