This week, I tallied poems and determined I have enough to work on self-publishing my next book, A Song of Glass. I’d like to add one more poem, and I need to write an introduction. Then I can start the (often arduous) process of setting the book up in Amazon’s self-publishing platform.
Poetry is often personal—extremely personal. As a result, I learn things about myself through writing. Grief is a recurring theme in my poems—specifically, grief that stems from struggling with change. And, I hate to admit it, but I’ve also learned I’m a hopeless romantic. Not in the dating sense, but in the intellectual / artistic sense (though not all elements of Romanticism apply to me). This makes change even harder to deal with because I romanticize things. In some sense, I’ve been in denial about this most of my life. But writing poetry has forced me to face facts!
Grief and change rear their heads in my poem, “Street View” (which will be in A Song of Glass). The last line came spontaneously, and has become something of a helpful mantra for me. Grief is something I can acknowledge but not live in; with God’s help, I have to move on.
Street View
I start to write a poem about a place I once knew,
an intersection where the bricks were crumbling
and the corners were dark,
where local-color coffee shops
with walls full of memory and cigarette smoke
bled black, caffeinated rebirth,
where vacant lots with tufts of dry grass stuck in them
gapped between the teeth of enameled buildings,
where shop walls had fragments of old store names
peeking through the paint peeling in plumes of dead color;
a place that was nowhere else, that had grit and texture and history,
a place I looked up using Google street view only to find
that the lots are filled,
the iconic local pizza place had a two story Chipotle
dropped on it,
a CVS pharmacy takes up most of the block
where the hole in the wall record store sat,
and everything that made that place
what it was is gone, lost
behind a face lift of air-brushed franchise,
mass production, and mixed materials facades
held out like architecture’s fake ID.
I want to drag the lake of my poetic soul
so I can pelt the world with garbage and old bones,
but as I start thinking about this loss
and the one before that and the one before that
I realize at 51 I could spend most of my time
visiting graves
because what are the days but waiting
and what are the nights but fading
and what is experience but learning
that living is dying. and dying is daily,
and grief is a gun I just can’t afford
to put to my head anymore.
A Wandering Minstrel 