It’s October. The morning sky is gray. There was a crow squawking up a ruckus from a neighboring rooftop and a hummingbird nosed the flowers on the magnolia tree outside of my apartment window. I wrote a poem to start the month – it’s about naming things as a way of saying thank you, as a way of not forgetting, as a love letter to the tangible world.
In addition to shaking my fist at our various modern predicaments (dating, gender wars, politics, current events), I’ve been asking myself if this is the time and place where I come in to my own as a writer. More accurately, I’ve been telling myself (reminding myself) that ever since I was a kid (first or second grade), I’ve wanted to be a writer. I’ve done a shitty job of pursuing it and spent most of my life ignoring it. Now, more than ever, I’m either telling myself it’s never too late or else asking myself, why not? or what’s stopping me?
Fear mostly. Followed by laziness and inexperience. Or perhaps laziness caused by fear. Fear of working hard at something and realizing the end result isn’t very good. I’m seldom happy with the end result. Fear of rejection. Multiple bouts with the “why bothers.” I’m also disorganized – both mentally and physically. I spend very little time revising what I’ve written. My poems folder has just over 200 “poems” in it. My draft poems folder has another 130 “poems” in it. I’m not sure what the difference is between a draft and a non-draft other than how I’m feeling about the writing in the moment. I use quotes because some of the “poems” are little more than a sentence or an observation or a fragment of my thinking. I have close to 1,500 notes on my notes app – a lot of those are observations and fragments. A fragment from yesterday was “fistfight swollen knuckles.” I could see them, but I couldn’t remember the kid’s name. High school, years ago, tall, gangling, wore a loose wife-beater type of t-shirt and saggy jeans – not the type of kid you’d think was a fighter. The note continued with a fragment of a story about a dorky dad who said dorky things. He followed everything up with the phrase, “am I right?” He once said it after sex and the woman, who would eventually become his wife, told him if he ever says that again after sex, they would never have sex again. The note continued with an observation about to young women who got on the bus. They got on before allowing a woman with a stroller to exit. When they exited, they jumped in front of a slow and elderly man with a cane. I wrote “with patience comes consideration.” I’ll forget about this note or how close I was to pinpointing a name or face, or the story about the dorky dad… much like I’ve forgotten about most of the poems in my folders.
Early last month I submitted a poem to an online journal. The journal publishes one poem a week. It was the only submission I sent out this year. On Monday, while out on an evening walk, I got an email telling me that my poem was accepted – they’ll let me know when they’re going to publish it. For 2025, my one and only submission has been accepted which means I have a 100% acceptance rate. I must be doing something right. Joking aside, the acceptance was a form of validation. I’m often writing in a vacuum. I don’t get much, if any, feedback. I also don’t solicit feedback – which may have something to do with that whole fear of rejection thing. I keep imagining reading some friend’s poetry or a girlfriend’s poetry and thinking, “uggh, this is crap.” It’s easy to turn the table and not want to subject someone to the awkward experience of having to read my crap and be polite about it. When I got home from my walk, I looked at other poems to send to other journals. I made some revisions but stopped short of submitting.
Because I’m not particularly well off, I spend a lot of time wishing I were better off. Time that I could probably devote to writing. It’s another excuse for why I don’t write more or practice more or get better at any of this. I’d write more and work less (or not at all) if I were better off. I’d love to be good enough to get a stipend or go to a retreat. I fantasize about an economic system in which people can pursue the things that interest them (music, writing, painting, fishing, drinking, thinking, skiing, being) and still survive. I lament that starting over in any given field usually has economic consequences, because man, I’d try a lot more things on for size. I grumble at the irony that in order to make enough money to have the free time to pursue other things, you typically have to sacrifice your free time. I’d be more ok with billionaires billionairing if they shared enough so that the rest of us didn’t have to spend the bulk of our time trying figure out how to stay alive and modestly well fed. Money may not buy you happiness, but it can relieve you of some stressors and inconveniences like bills and busses and laundry and remembering to register the car. More importantly it can afford you time.
It’s October and I can hear the breeze dragging the leaves across the cement patio in the courtyard. I want to go for a walk. I want to be surrounded by the gray. I want it to be cool enough to need the hoodie or the flannel. Most of all I want to write about it.