Not Quitting My Day Job

My poetry is still exceedingly sub par. That's really ok. I like the process of writing it. Squeezing my brain around word choices. Laughing and groaning at my overblown, over emotional, output. I think if i were to go back to college i would take a poetry class, not so much reading but writing. Are those different classes? It would be the hardest class i ever took. I can't imagine trying to get one out, poetically speaking, in an academic environment.

The fact that my poems always suck seems so irrelevant to me. By the time i, or anyone else, is reading them, I have gotten all i need from them. Anything else at that point is just for fun. I wonder if poets ever feel the same way? Once you finish that piece, and you know you have gotten out what you had inside to say, does having someone else read it even matter?

Not that it isn't fun. Knowing someone else is seeing those silly things that you felt strong enough about to try and disguise on one hand, and show with uncompromising vulnerability with the other. It's kind of like emotional flashing. All these symbols and words being used to cover up your most naked feelings, with these rare moments of verbal lucidity to expose it all, before covering it just as quickly.

I guess that makes sense. Blogging, especially this king of blogging, is just emotional exhibitionism at it's heart.

I'm thankful for all my emotional voyeurs =)

The Blood of Eden

I caught sight of my reflection
I caught it in the window
I saw the darkness in my heart
I saw the signs of my undoing
They had been there from the start
And the darkness still has work to do

The Reader

"Did [she] ever acknowledge the effect she had on your life?"

"Well, she had done much worse to other people."

Sometimes it amazes me how self centered, how self absorbed we are as people. While those terms have such negative connotations attached to them culturally, I suppose it's no big surprise. We are wired that way. Our lives, our experiences, are the only ones we truly know. We have no choice but to view the world and life through the infinitely minuscule sliver of perspective that is our own existence.

I suppose then that is the value, and the challenge, of things like empathy, and seeing things through the eyes of others.

Is it any wonder we spent so long assuming the sun revolved around the Earth? Deep down we all assume that everyone revolves around us, especially when we sleep.

It's no wonder that my definition of love has evolved the way it has. What in life has value more than stepping out from underneath the veil of "me" that we are all born and live under?