Wonderful Friday night, my wife's home from work, and we just watched Bill Murray being awarded the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Award, and isn't it funny to watch an old dude like Bill and wonder how he grew so old while you remain so young? Speaking of which, I turned 79 this month on the 20th, and I'm still pursuing my goal fiercely, when I'm not weeping for myself, to get someone other than myself to publish a novel I've written. I'm slowly rewriting a short story from a first person narrative into a combined third person/omniscient pov, and I've even sent off a couple of haikus to haiku magazines. I've got a hundred of them at least. These last two days I've been working on another prostate cancer poem for Up Your Ass, and I'm beginning to understand what I'm trying to do. I'm layering in historical personages, friends, details from my own and others lives and historical moments and surrounding them with my mortality and letting them sit side by side to percolate together, hoping that something enticing will show up to stimulate a reader's mind. I no longer experience those powerful moments when words are summoned from out of nowhere by emotion and bonded in metaphor to mean something else. I guess imagination still works, but much more gently. Why else would Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Gabby Hayes, Nancy and her "Ronnie" Reagan appear together in the poem I'm working on? The inspiration is still there, but it doesn't torture me so much.
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