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The State of Poetry

I feel at times like a relic of another age. I decided today not to apologize for poetry. My temperament produces it, even if I don’t carry it on my sleeve, or feel a need to be shouting it from rooftops.

People often don’t know what to do with me, if I show my true colors. I have a vast internal space, filled with prodigious quantities of what I think are interesting events: circuses, tragedies, villains, heroes, wrapped in an alternately luminous and spectral fog, coalescing and dissolving continually. Strange things flow from this mist at times, and I quite often let them. I try to be rational, but very certainly am not ruled at all times by reason. There are higher, more accurate knowings, even though reason is the shovel that moves the most dirt.

Romantically, I don’t think most women know what to do with this. I have met only one woman I can remember who seemed to be able to see me, and not react with confusion and unease. I don’t walk the paths other people do. I am out in the desert, or exploring a foggy bog, or on a boat in the North Sea discovering new islands. Particularly when I am still, I am in constant motion.

That will do for now. There is something I am trying to see–and a decision I am trying to make–but it isn’t coming to me just yet. I will keep moving.