So much is going on in my life at this time, things pushing and pulling for attention. The shape to my first novel continues to evolve. I write satire. What to do with a story about a dreamer working to create a special photographic gallery of high repute. Hope. The elixir of dreamers, the thing that holds the door of perception open just sufficiently for a peek into how a dreamer fares when hopped up on hope. I'm thinking one Wendell Wankerman might be just the right guy.
It is also at this time that my twenty year poetry itch; give or take, has returned. That itch is infectious, and has begun. I was given a blank book wrapped in thick, luxuriously soft leather, that folds over the blank pages and has a leather strap to wrap around and tuck in. the type of item that might well be seen in an Elizabethan setting, some years ago. I love that book, and pick it up sometimes just to smell the leather, inhaling deeply, an aroma that puts me in a grand place.
Being poetically tuned mentally, another way of saying actually having bribed the little Muse out of Mu with promises of cold beer, is that state whereupon words begin to flow through the brain pan, and lines begin to form on the page. This is heady stuff, when one is in the throes of creative brilliance. Each twenty years shows the changes in me over that period of time, altering somewhat the temp and rhythm of my poetry.
When my late wife and I lived in Mexico in '97-/98, I was actively writing poetry, as I was a year earlier when I spent two weeks in Mazatlán by myself, pondering my predicament; having been freed up as a single parent after the short ones had grown up and left, with the requisite freedoms involved, or, entertain the notion of becoming involved with a woman I had just met. It was the final night in my room, with the squeaky ceiling fan, penning a poem on how a good brand of tanning oil takes the squeak out of a ceiling fan. The young Chica across the way was returning from a night out, stumbling about and banging on the door, which manifested another poem, and through out this night of Kahlua bliss I was feeling, I was being pulled in both directions.
And that, got me to begin reading the poetry I had written while there. Turns out, half the poems were about the woman waiting for me back in Tucson. Turns out, that was the choice I made, and never regretted it. And that, brings me to the point of the ramble. It was so easy to pen lines of poetry, while I was in Mexico. When I go to a coffee house or outdoor cafe or restaurant patio, and people watch, here in my own town. Nada. Emptiness. The poetic root has dried up, the Muse drunk in Mu not caring a whit about helping me.
After many years of working on that though, and finally getting back to actually laying lines on the page, I have come to realize it has to do with predictability. When I was in Mexico, we had no idea how things worked or would turn out with some of the blind choices made at the time. It was wonderful. All new, with a new story. At home, I can predict so much about the people I observe. That's no fun. So, I have been working on shifting my perspective, and expectations on whatever subject being observed. I have been bearing some fruit with that one. That takes time. Using Dr Dyer's Dictum; "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change".
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