The past few days feels maybe like a door opened, or maybe a window or maybe a wound. Some release of pressure and a flowing of something that wasn't here a couple weeks ago. . Maybe it just takes time, or maybe just numbness to what goes on around me. I feel less paralyzed--with fear? with dread? Nothing has changed and yet maybe something has changed. And while I don't know if it's permanent, I'm gonna go with it and see what happens. The world out there is still crazy and toxic and possibly contagious, but in here, I am feeling more like myself at times.
I've been puttering a way on The Shining series, trying out titles, and have at least a chapbook length segment of them, and at least a half dozen more still coming maybe. They are not bad, even the ones I wrote robotically and less-than-inspired at the beginning of April. The project as a whole is beginning to have a shape--a voice--that I am liking. I've been working on it a bit daily first thing over breakfast, before the scrolling through social media poisons my brain for the day. Write the poem, then check facebook, because inevitably, you will find things to be at best, annoyed about, at worst panicky or livid. Things that make it harder to write, to concentrate, to care.
As the project takes shape, I begin to see a pattern, and end to it, or a path toward it and maybe that's what we lack in this pandemic world that we so badly need. And not just any path, but one guided by science and humanitarian concerns and not by profit and the incel nation who refuse to wear masks in Costco. I can't do much about the world beside wear my mask and stay away from people, but I can shape The Shining project into something interesting, so here's to controlling the things we can and not too much worry over what we cannot.
