mimsy and outgrabe

I've been trying to declutter my house for years, ever since we moved in here, really, but earnest work in this area was only really accomplished last summer and this summer. Despite these efforts, however, I've entered a new phase of hoarding: now my iCloud account is filled with clutter. Slug. This is because I compulsively take photos of just about everything, like my friend here, whom I tried to capture next to the leaf for scale and while he was stretched out fully, but only one of those two things was accomplished, clearly. This fucker was LONG. Like, I could have put a leash on him and raised him as a pet. But I didn't. Because slug. Ultimately my hoarding of pictures is really a symptom of severe Fear of Missing Out, like I can't possible remember something unless I document it with a picture and what if I can't remember it? What then am I made of? And if I'm a sum of my memories and experiences, does this mean I'm comprised of fluf...

Today I'm coming off that glow that arrives during, and just after, working on something you're obsessing over for about 24 hours straight. It's amazing how empty I can feel of ideas and music and language for so long and then, thankfully, they all come back in a flood and I create something that makes me excited, happy, and that I read and feel like, "yeah, that's a poem ."  In one of my graduate classes, back when I was a fucking baby with stars in my eyes, Derek Walcott said that most of what we write, if we're lucky, is just good verse. Every once in a while (for him), or once in a lifetime (me), we write a poem. So currently I feel like I wrote a poem, but knowing myself fairly well at this point, I'm conscious of the fact that a few months from now I'll probably look back at the piece and regard it as merely good verse. And that's okay. Because there are fewer stars in my eyes and I'm not quite so young (although maybe I act...

So, the micro-sabbatical was a good idea and totally, wholly worth the planning, effort, work and (some) trouble, but like the best-laid plans, it didn't deliver everything it promised when it was being conceived in my head. For one, you may have noticed -- and been grateful for -- a conspicuous absence of blog posts, right after I'd written something like, "lookout, I'm gonna blow up your feed," or whatever. It turned out that it took me far, far too long to write that first/only blog post of the micro-sabbatical -- like, about two hours -- and that's probably because I haven't written in the blog for a long time and it always takes me a while to get back into the rhythm of the thing, and writing prose. So, when I'd spent a good part of my precious kid-free, solitary-in-the-house time writing about writing the verse play but not actually working on the play itself, I decided that blog posts were not as beneficial when you're working with a h...