Get Ur Knives Out

a few months ago i wrote a post on this blog announcing that i was done sending to contests. at that point i was, and since that moment have only been sending to small independent presses in the hopes having my book published by one of the many little presses whose work i respect and admire.

my manuscript, however, was still at the contests i had sent it to before deciding against future submissions to them. turns out i won one, and i have accepted the prize. so whatever barbs you wanna throw my way, i guess i deserve it to some extent. i would say that i'm not too much of a hypocrite and that this is just an ironic turn of events, for whatever that's worth.

Naïve Melody

*

The past and future exist in each moment. There is no such thing as time. It’s just a construct we have to help us deal with reality. I was like that then, I am like this now is more acceptable to say to people than I am large. I contain multitudes.


*

There is nothing to get through. Whatever is there always will be, in various forms. There is only being in—Merrily, life is but a dream.


*

Jobs are incidental, shells that surround the days. I dream about work at night. In the morning I feel like crying. The rest of the time, I'm fine.


*

My uncle once said to me, Memoirs are just memories. What do we do with the things we forget? I’ve never been able to parse out if this is an evocative phrase or nonsense, something akin to a double negative.


*

Do the things we forget somehow live on without us, independently? Perhaps they are what we mean when we say ghosts. Guilt. There are things we should remember, we know we should. We forget them.


*

Perhaps this is purgatory. What a fate for an event or person's existence to become things that someone else is dimly aware they have forgotten.


*

My uncle is a combat veteran and (from what I can gather) has seen more people killed than he can remember. He knows this. But that does not change the lives and deaths he once knew and has forgotten.


*

Everything is contained in this world and within it there are levels of reality and our souls eternally move through various levels depending on the body we inhabit in a life time. I like that idea.


*

My first memory is being taken for a ride on my father’s motorcycle, a Triumph. I was two, maybe three. We rode around our sizeable rural yard. It was raining. He had no front fender so the rain and mud sprayed up on our faces. He sat me in front of him and held me with his legs. He had a bracket that he mounted on the gas tank for me to hold onto. When we came back in the house he helped me take my wet shoes of and my mother removed my dirty clothes. Neither remembers any of this.

Update

bronchial sick, a change of weather thing. cough, sore throat, lung infection. very tired.

actually started a new poem last night. writing them out by hand now so there's a lot of scratching out. a slow process. the skeleton so far is looking good. no idea if the poem will be.