BEATNICK BREATHING THE WAFTING AIRS OF SUCCESS

Wouldn't it be nice?

Nothing is more mysterious than our emotional apparatus. Mine included. I've been experiencing continuous days of happiness, sometimes punctuated with ecstatic joy. I'm not spending thousands of dollars on stuff I don't need, not flying off to exotic vacations on Caribbean islands. It's not the manic phase of a bipolar swing. Maybe it's the screenwriting course I'm enjoying extravagantly. Maybe it's the increasing number of readers of this blog. Maybe it's the recognition and publication of my poem Legacy in WA129 [Sage Hill Press] and the concurrent invitation by Poet Laureate Tod Marshal to join him and Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna and his wife Toni Luna for a joint reading sponsored by the Washougal Library two weeks back. Very good to be included among them. Perhaps it's Tod's warm appreciation of other of my poems as well. Part of my joy has to be the steady sunshine of my wife's love for me that warms and nourishes me, and the love I feel for her that opposes the constant goads of ego that we all experience. I'm blossoming like a petunia in the corner of a rarely visited garden of the literary arts. Maybe it's Portland itself. Whatever it is, I'm standing at the window of World Cup Coffee at the corner of 18th and Glisan in Portland on a powerfully sunlit day and feeling as successful and rewarded as if I'd just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can something be awaiting my lifelong efforts? Feels like it, but, then, the emotional apparatus of the human species is mysterious as hell. Isn't it? And as far as I can see, no actual gold laden Spanish galleon rides the horizon.