Thankful

I am thankful to be a poet. It makes me happy. It occupies my mind and strokes my hair. (Not in a sick self-congratulatory way but lovingly.) My gray cells celebrate the ring-a-ding pinball course of thought. 

Of course, there are the days I loathe my work or torture myself with accusations of being lazy. (And sometimes I am.) There are the tedious days when I look up journals to send my work to, and try to think which 4 to 6 poems go together in a provocative way. And there are the days of rejections or the weeks. The dread silence when everything is out.The days when one can only regurgitate the banal or the cliched.

White paper (or screen)--it should be an occasion for joy. A space to have my say with metaphors, alliteration, line breaks.

Writing poems is work for which I rarely get paid which means that it's the side-scramble, the column that sometimes gets jettisoned. But it has shaped me more than anything else except being a parent. It has taught me how to see the world in a way that makes for a deeper life.