We love them. We love to hate them. The statistics on my blog tell me I’m most productive at the beginning of the year. Rising from Christmas and New Year’s Eve along with spirits, peaking around my birthday in March, a happy time :); the graph plateauing out over the summer, when it’s hot and emotional. And then the dip in the Fall, when the Winter comes on in phases, the leaves fall off the trees, school becomes harder to walk to and my computer is used more for mathematical modeling than creative outlet.
It’s true that nobody looks at your work the same way you do when you write it. There’s some intent lost in translation, some richness of memory that is choked by your limited vocabulary. Which is why it makes comments that much more interesting, if amusing, at times. The most difficult thing to reconcile about making your writing public (good or bad as it may be) is the fact that some of your favourites don’t always resonate with what your readers’ favourites are.
And this is why I hate statistics. Because I feel like I must produce, now, because I always have.
So I will do something I never do: Return to an earlier draft of a poem I couldn’t complete, and complete it.
And to my unnecessarily melodramatic self, this will be a moment of revelation, of the extent to which I have crossed the difficult-to-tread line between tech-strapped lcd-screen-bleached engineer-in-training and deist sun-burned outdoorsy wannabe-poet. Not to mention my quarter-life crisis issues.
Salt and Pepper simile
He’s bent over the counter,
his back arched by time.
He’s smiling, broad,
his face cracks into a million smiles.
-
He’s humming a creaky love song
It has such lonely words.
Fingers smear the glass
with a white, faltering grip.
-
He has no fiery ambition,
no mastery will to live,
no kindness born of affluence,
no happiness to give.
-
He’s leaning back on the wood,
it’s convolutions planned,
moving back, and forward
and back. And forward.
-
The coffee scalds his tongue,
like nitrogen that’s cold
giving heat, taking heat
it’s all the same to him.
-
The grease in his omelette,
she says it’ll kill him someday,
he’s 76 and running,
but he lets her have her way.
-
She wipes the butter off the bun,
in a single mastered swipe,
he trembles with the sugar,
he shakes with his knife
-
He’s a man of the ages,
but he has no tale to tell,
he spent his life and living,
try’na buy himself from hell
.
‘Aint got no magic wisdom,
not a countryman by pride,
his weeks worth of pennies,
paid for the blanket by his side
.
Got a sparkle in his eye,
when he drops her some 25cents,
a quarter of his daily fare,
for her smile and innocence
.
And yet this man is dreaming,
of a future, of a time,
his cookie jar is full with pennies,
his meals rid of crime
.
And tonight he’ll lie waiting,
for the brand new year to dawn,
he’s got the best seat in the house,
by the bridge, on someone else’s lawn
—
Started New year’s Eve 2008
Chicago O’Hare, USA
Extended 07 Jan 2010
Kitchener Bus Terminal, Canada
–
Aareet
