The machine I am

is a grading machine. A thresher of student papers. A great unstoppable mill for which these 12 essays are mere & easily-processed grist. So to work.

But first, I'm glad to report my return to relative health, & my return to the composition of poems. A 2 day break from writing poems, in my world, amounts to years. Wrote one today about a huge cross-section of a 500-year-old tree & American history, but I didn't like the sound of my voice. I don't think it had to do exclusively with the fact that it was written - for I didn't choose to do so - in blank verse. More to do, I think, with ekeing out a sort of compromise between my voice and the strictures of the form in which it all took shape. This situation might involve my reading Walcott (The Star-Apple Kingdom), who's adapted the traditional blank verse setup to his unique & stylized dialect. After him, I'd best get me back to my McGrath.

Je suis "sick as a dog"

That's a David Kirby poem title. I'm often teased for being a bellyacher when sick. I think that this prophecy / observation self-fulfills. You laugh at a sick fellow for being down w/ the whole experience of sickness, and this treatment just lades further life-weight upon the soul. And sighs commence. So I tend to frown a lot when my nose is red. Does that make me a bellyacher? So be it. (Frowns; sighs.)

In this state, nonetheless, I have to:

a) continue researching / contacting / sending application materials to various East Coast community colleges;

b) comment on something like 100 pages of student-penned insights;

c) write a poem, a good one that is;

d) read about the sonnet for class;

e) heal myself;

f) submit to the tense second-ticks of 24;

g) return to some manner of substantive, meaningful blogging. Keep it here.