here is the truth of loss
what existed, exists

here is truth of found
what is found, must first be lost

here is the truth of hope
what might exist, must exist

here is the truth of despair
what ends, must first begin

here is the truth of socks
where one exists, so does two.

The wisp of a wannabe flapper with short mousy brown hair wiped away fog from the window. She looked out into her backyard to see the path down which any young woman like her would want to run. She watched the young doe run. She watched the doe disappear when the winds picked up.

She ran her fingers through over her furrowed brow and her scalp. She told herself,”No, no, it’s ok to be bit slow to sit back down.”

“It’s ok,” she told herself as she dropped back down into her worn oak chair. “It’s ok, it’s been an while and the deer’s clearly gone.”

When she was younger, she’d followed that path more times than she could ever count. More times than she would want to count even if she could. But the morning was perfect, and she wanted to forget all those other walks. The morning was perfect, and all she wanted to do was join her cloven-footed friend out in the great somewhere else.

She took a stack of dishes to the sink, and tried looked out that window as she gave each plate a brisk cleaning.

“Goodbye,” she thought. “Good bye deer friend.”

She thought it so loudly, as if she’d never see that doe again. As if the soft brown of her fur would be nothing but a memory and that was that, but the truth was far more mundane and she knew it. She knew that if she waited until tomorrow just after dawn, she’d look out at her apple trees and see the same deer munching away again, even if only for a moment.

She pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse, tapped one out and lit it. She pulled the first perfect fog of nicotine into her lungs and let herself go on with a bit of a sputtering shuttering fluttering like an antique lamp.  Cigarettes are cheaper than finding a way to hire a maid, she told herself as she pretended to do a bit of housework to fool herself.

For hours, she sad on the couch, fingering a little hole in the left arm with her pinky and trying not to sob as she worried about hunters killing the deer. A fierce resolve crashed over her. Today was the day.

She dressed in her outdoor clothes – blue jeans, a gray t-shirt, white socks and sneakers. She imagined some 10-point buck hard and ready to deliver his sperm into the most ordinary doe in all the woods.

She got to the door, took a long breath, opened the door and stood there on the breezeless edge of the late afternoon. She shook a little as she listened to a train pass. She took another longer deeper deep breath. She laid a powerless punch into the door frame. She watched a bird – a modest orange bird devoid of tweet or name or perhaps even feet as it flew off into that vast expanse of anywhere.

A tear fell down her cheek, and she closed the door again.

I will never forgive the zebras
for the audacity of stripes
or the sound of their hooves
8,000 kilometers away, atop the dry june grass

I will never forgive them
for the cowardice of being eaten
shedding blood upon the teeth
of the powerful, when the weak would do just as well.

I will never forgive the damned Zebra
for the gutlessness of rapture
the sudden stop before heaven
and the long wait as the winter night grows cold
then colder
still.

I will never forgive them
for the orgasm of the stud
or the braying of the mare
or the want of the foal
for another summer
one more december
without my voice warning them of boomslang
of puff adder, of the sameness
of a cheetah and other cheetah
and another until it becomes clear
that all of the spots are the same
and no clause is retractable on the veldt.

with a flash of orange
a kestrel lifts a tiny mouse
up to the feces stained walls of her nest

her noisy chicks become quiet
as they eat

the remains rot over time
and the smell joins the symphony
of her droppings.

I couldn’t make out what she said, but from the reaction of the cashier, I suspect it was glib. She fixed her collar and paid for the chamois. She glanced at some perfumed called Mystical as she walked out the door past an incoming police officer.

I couldn’t get her out of my head for days, thoughI could remember nothing specific about her except that her hair wasn’t too light and she had long fingernails painted red.

My friend Bob and I were talking over a couple of Buds and some grilled rattlesnake and I tried to explain to him what made her special.

“So let me get this straight, you see some chick in a big chain department stoor, you don’t say a word. Basically, you noticed her butt wiggle and then she was gone?”

“It wasn’t that tawdry.”

“Well, what was it is if you can’t remember anything about her, you didn’t hear her voice, and you can’t even remember her face enough that you think you’d remember her?”

For a minute, I hated Bob. I tried to polish all the soot off my scorched fantasies of this woman, but it was too late. Bob had turned the magical into something plastic. Something without a breath.

A couple of days later Bob gave me a ring and asked how I was doing. There was this mockery hanging in his voice begging me to bring up the woman at the store. But I just said bye and hung up.

I watched suds refuse to parade down my drain. They waited in that midway-place between the sewer and the sky and one by one refused to die without a silent soapy pop.

While they popped, I used a bit of bleach bleach and cold water to pull up a stain from the counter. Then, with my fingers nearly frozen and completely waterlogged, I sat down to read some haiku by Buson.

I was too distracted by the way my hands reeked of dishes and bleach so I gave up trying to read and headed back to the store.

As I walked past, it was the same cashier as the other day spanking down items on the counter and tallying up absurd numbers to share with strangers. The sheer meaninglessness of all of this was plastered on her face, and I knew there was nothing I could do to save her.

I  loitered for a while, bobbed in and out of different departments looking for nothing and no one.

An hour or so later, I left when I realized it was true – she wasn’t there.

the heron stood at the apex of the roof next door
and I watched him

as he peered off to the east
bemused by a sunless dawn

we waited together for something to change
for the wind
for the rain

we waited
until it seemed certain
another day had some

then he was gone

Back in the day I used to write poetry as I was inspired. I’d wait and something would strike me and I’d jot it down. If I weren’t moved to deep emotion, I didn’t worry about it.

On top of that I didn’t worry all that much about editing. I wrote what I wrote, and it was what it was.

All that changed on a site called The Alsop Review. It’s a really nice poetry workshop site, and I can’t say enough positive about it. I really found some tremendous poets doing some amazing work there, so keep that context through the rest of the story.

One day, I was merrily writing a poem about growing from boyhood into manhood using a sapling and the intrusion of a bulldozer as a metaphor and I was very proud of myself. I posted the work up on the site and waited for accolades.

Instead, I received something less than a warm reception. I got comments like “There is not one redeemable, salvageable line in this entire piece” and “Wow, that was awful.”

Somewhere between 20 and 40 comments later, my ego was completely crushed. Not a single positive comment.

Honestly, it was a good thing.

For the next month or two, I didn’t write a single poem. Then after that, I realized, I needed to know much more about poetry if I were going to keep writing. It is far too painful to be the imbecile splashing words against the wall in hopes that a few stick.  So I read bunches of poetry text books, and dozens and dozens of poetry books by classic poets and modern poets and any well-respected poet I could find.

Six months or so of that, and then I started to write again. This time, I only wrote by choice. I avoided writing poetry – or anything – when i was in emotional turmoil. I started to wait and write what I wanted to write.

So, for a long time, I would sit down and say, “Today, I”m going to write <insert style here> about <insert random theme>.”

I devised bunches of little prompts and exercises to push myself. I wrote ream upon ream to give myself material to edit later. And often, now, I do edit old work until it is completely new.

My writing process works like this:

1. 5-10minutes when I first wake up. Jot notes and ideas and any key lines that pop in my head.
2. Throughout the morning, jot notes into a  google docs file as things pop in my head.  The 10-30 seconds it takes to stash a note for later is invaluable.
3. Lunch time, write a paragraph or two, or a poem or two.
4. Afternoon, continue to jot occassional notes to myself.
5. late afternoon before dinner, write a poem.
6. before bed write 1-4 poems.

The poems are usually, but not always, about the same subjects as the notes. Whatever I read, or see, or hear, I put in the notes to use later. I also copy book marks so that i can go back and review links.

If I want to locate a poem somewhere, I frequently look up that place on google maps or on atlas site. I also look up things like indigenous birds, plants and animals. I go to wolframalpha to get statistics that might help me understand life in that location or drop me thoughts on odd or interesting things i can work into my pieces.

The more information I have, the more words I have to work with. Generally, I also google key words throughout the notes and thoughts to see if I can connect things to literature, movies or pop-culture.

All of that goes into every poem. That’s my basic process.

she said, ‘damn the rich’
with a twitch of her nose
a stitch ripped from the slip ‘neath her clothes

‘damn the rich, the lovely
the jaded, damn all the girls
whose best days have faded’

she said, ‘damn the rich’
with a tear on her finger
a curse on her fear as she wallowed it lingered

‘damn the rich, the needless
the means,  damn all the boys
who wink in tight jeans

she said ‘damn the rich’
with a sighed loss of breath
a blessing for daddy, so close to death

‘damn the rich, the hurtful
the cruel,  damn all the puppies
damn the whole world

she said, ‘damn the rich’
but she don’t mean a thing
ignore the damned chick, watch the wren sing

I have a lot of friends who suffer from writer’s block. I won’t lie and say I’ve never experienced it, but I have some strategies I’ve been using for a long time that have made it pretty rare for me. The best book I ever read that delved into this subject was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The advice there was “Look Closer” break things down into smaller bites and if it’s not small enough, then go smaller and closer.

This is the first thing way I avoid blockage, but I also sidestep it by avoiding the desire or inclination to create anything of any quality. Fear of not living up to one’s own expectations or the expectations of others is a huge mental block.

So this is what I’ve come up with so far, usually, blockage is caused by one of avery few causes.

1. You want to create something amazing and you’re afraid of creating something crappy.
2. Your mind is all over the place and you can’t figure out specifically what you want to do.
3. Nothing ‘feels’ interesting or worth the time to create. aka “a lack of inspiration”
4. Completely focused one on project and stuck with it.

Fear is difficult to overcome, but in that case, creating ANYTHING is better than nothing. So if you feel like you’re trying to create soemthing AWESOME, but everything is coming out crap, then create MORE. Much more.  The frustration of creating nothing is much greater than the frustration of creating something average or sub-par. Also, the sub-par materials you create can be edited and used later.

Now, if you feel scattered, the best solution is simply to be more specific. When you start to write about ‘love’ and you’ve got nothing, write about romantic love. When you can’t write about Romantic love, write about your worst romantic love, when you can’t write about your worst romantic love, write about your worst romantic love’s bad breath. Eventually, you’ll find that a thousand words are written, and it’s hard to claim that your’e blocked once you’ve produced like that.

Now the last problem, that one is probably the one that  tough. But if that’s where you are, if you don’t “Feel” anything. Try to pick one thing, any one thing, and look at it through a prism of experience and emotion. For example… take a duck. Look at it first as a chinese meal, then as a duckling in a pond, then as a collection of feathers, then as a verb.. find 20 ways to look at it. Sketch each, write a haiku about each, do anything you can imagine with each and then see how they relate together. Don’t worry what you feel, complete it like an intellectual exercise.  Sometimes, you have to do an end-round the emotion to find the way back to it.

Now the last one, the over-focused on a single project that you’re stuck on. That one is interesting. I get that way a bit, but I usually just set things aside. The problem with doing that is that projects languish. I’m not sure I can recommend constantly setting them aside.  I think maybe, a more productive approach might be to allow yourself to digress. If your’e working on a project, a poem, – anything – and you find yourself at an impasse, just let go. Don’t worry if the next thing you write ‘fits’ just roll with it. Expand on something that requires no expansion, give yourself permission to play with it. See if you can find the joy in what you’re doing.

Finally, the other thing you can do when you get ‘stuck’ is talk about it with smart people. NO offense intended to stupid people, but they won’t be as helpful. Explain what you’re doing to a really smart person, tell them what you’re thinking about when you do it. And when they start to ask you questions, answer them as in depth as you can.

This can really help you find ways around the obstacles.

I have many other strategies around blocks in creativity, feel free to ask me for more details.

apron stained with juice
big and too red to be blood
– hungry ants walk past

five dirty dishes
soak in the slick gray water
the stench too heavy to rise

once blue hula hoop
filthy and faded in the yard
“Maggie” still legible

a bike with flat tires
hangs in back of the garage
the streamers dancing