Myriad Ways

“I don’t know about you, but my right-now life is laden with reality: bills, the 9-to-5 (necessary to pay said bills), the leaden thing that weighs on everyone at said 9-to-5 (making them mean and me mean), family, the failures of family, a slowing metabolism and no will or energy to exercise. It’s a maddeningly endless personal abyss. And the language that surrounds me every day–mostly sad, simple transactional language–fails.

Yet the poems I’m sharing this darkening October month come from writers who somehow manage to slip out of the trance that keeps us subservient to reality, tethered to the mundane. When they lapse into consciousness, they are possessed as Nietzsche was when he wrote “No artist tolerates reality.” Those who are awake, if only momentarily, are the artists. And by artists, I mean these writers who feel and tinker until they’ve given form to something that exists within the bandwidth of reality but resists humdrum conventionality. Of course, it’s akin to the famed tell it slant. But more than that, they’re telling it like it ain’t, not keeping it real.”

Kevin Simmonds,  introduction to poem of the week 10/11/13

Every now and then I stick my head out of my mundane shell of day to day survival and find a poem, but not today. I was not trudging through the viscera of life though. I was reading and trying get my head up a little higher so I could start seeing the parts of the world that can only be seen when I am not creeping along trying to make a living and dealing with slings and arrows (Fortune can be such a bitch sometimes). But here I have a few hours and some inspiration, breathing in. So I can hopefully mingle some of this fresh air with some of the overused stuff I have been moving around  and come up with a something not real that is a synthesis of outside input mixed with imagination and reasoning. I always feel a little more optimistic about life when I get a little space to breathe in. The breath out is just a relaxing of the diaphragm, an easy sigh of relief.