This decadent night
Will be forever tattooed in my memory,
Etched in the finest folds of my
Often broken down brain.
The waves are opulent,
Flashing their white tips.
You are solid beside me,
A fantasy of a human being –
Silver hair shining under the starlight
Like mylar.
Dreams blow by us
Like coastal tumbleweed.
Breezes try to come between us,
But from now on 2 are 1.
(That’s how they do math in paradise.)
Your lips seek my yearning mouth
And you asked if you could kiss me,
And I said yes,
The exclamation mark hovering
Between us like a match.
Tag: self publishing
Kitchen Knife
In the crisp, cropped morning –
gold daydreams at the edges.
I hurry to class
fantasizing about books,
about the secret haven of birds,
about a candy leopard.
The future ripples like
accommodating grass
with each turn I make.
Each choice is a wind setting out
over the plane of my uncategorized existence
like a ray of light.
What lies in the center of beauty
but a fawn sleeping soundly,
her mother still 3 days away
from the hunter’s gun?
Amiable maps will reveal
the road to catharsis,
but hide the rambling path
of permanent joy
that I have to cut into the brush myself with a kitchen knife.
Goals
Sometimes I feel confused about my goals. I want to get a book published, or do I? Am I prepared to play the game of submitting to contests at $25 and $30 dollars a pop? Most presses use expensive contests now to publish books.
Maybe it would be best if I tried to get a second chapbook published, and self publish a poetry book. If you self publish you don’t get literary acclaim and you don’t get to experience the purifying process of working with an editor. You do, however, get control of your book and to release your work out into the world without waiting for a middle man that might never come through.
I guess the truth is I hate submitting my work. I don’t mind the rejection letters. I just hate the process of struggling to find a press that even seems like it jives with my work, and then writing a mind numbing letter and inane bio. I know I should do it, but when I get free time I want to write and revise, not search and submit.
Every field has its dues that must be paid, and poetry is no exception to that. But sometimes I wonder about alternative paths, like blogging or self publishing. It doesn’t hurt to try. Or do I need to buckle down and start submitting again?
Miniature Moon 