Resolve weakening

So, I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to be. Ah well. I'm still trying to get in a little bit here and there - and 30 poems in as many days was a pretty gigantic goal in the first place. I am still making it in with 3-4 solid writing days a week, which is more than I was doing before this. Maybe I'll just extend the timeline out beyond April.

Part of the problem, I think, is that big things are happening and while I sort of want to write from that place of bewilderment that I'm in right now, I don't think it's right. I remember my creative writing teacher in 2001, immediately after the terrorist attacks, saying, I will NOT look at any poems about September 11. It is too early, he said - don't write for the drama in the drama - poems are about introspection and reflection and no one has reflected enough to digest what has happened here.

At the same time, there is something to be said for rawness, for the visceral edge that comes through when the subject is the excruciating now.

But again. What's going on is not so much moment to moment excruciating (not an acute symptom) but rather a drawn out, low lying buzz of emotion. That's hard to catch and sharpen and hone into something worthy of a poem. It's more of a stress, an anxiety, a greyness. Not necessarily bad, of course, because I feel I'm stepping in the right direction, I really believe that, but it's complex and rather undefineable, the emotional state I find myself living. If it were more immediate, more poignant, then maybe I would feel more comfortable writing it. It's hard to articulate something so ... shifting and variable?

Enough rambling. A little light poem to hopefully refresh a bit. It's an old one.

Saturday

And I'm still in bed,
awash in the words of each thin, backlit page.
The sun slides in slats through the blinds,
across the spread of my legs, my fingers
my hair and my face.

If I could trace it,
through time and intensity—

if I could still its erasure, keep each moment--

If it left its stain here,
laying its smooth, lazy, paint,
I would be lit and wet and glowing with swaths
of white-whittled light,
tempered only by the brush of quick clouds.