Editing poems for a collection...
My words seem so concrete and everyday...
Sifting through the mud for small bits of gold or silver...
Sacrificing pillars of words for longer lines...
I tend to write in small bursts of broken lines that would take up less space in sentence form...
I don't like being broken by the margins...
I usually avoid them as much as possible...
I enjoy everyday language, but sometimes I wish that I didn't tend to constrain myself to expository writing...
Poets that write so that words float disjointedly off of the page, and yet still capture an emotion with fluid grace...
To me, I seem utilitarian...
Wrenches and gears...
The interlocking teeth of a machine...
Not the complex, delicate and minute gears driven by fine wound springs counterbalanced and weighted to precisely measure the passage of fluidity and artifice...
Larger gearing...
A standard transmission versus an automatic...
Teeth that I can feel grinding from the work of pistons firing...
My unedited expression feels common when I look back on it after letting it ferment in a bottle at the back of a cool storage room for several months...
Expecting fine wine and finding vinegar...
Editing doesn't come easy to me...
Not every word is precious, but I want every word to be precious...
I have a hard time letting go...
Once it's written, it's alive, and once alive, doesn't a thing deserve to continue living?
That's not how nature works, though...
There is no ultimate goal...
The destination of evolution, the end point, is extinction, not transcendence...
Before then, it's just blindly being exposed to environmental factors that either promote continued survival and reproduction, or end in non-viable mutation...
It doesn't think, and I'm always overthinking the way bronze age nomads created God's logos...
Trying to understand the process in absentia...
Not everything that appears in this world was meant to be in this world, not meant to stay; its existence just a simple inevitability wrestled from the chaos...
I have difficulty accepting this as I replay the tapes and recordings, the photojournalism of the videographer documenting non-physical events...
A time-lapse black-and-white of inevitable decay, life eating life...
Fruiting fungus reaching its fibrous mycelium into the medium of brown rice, wheat, rye berries, and vermiculite...
Precise quantum calculus that I can never seem to understand constructing everything I experience, but I try to understand...
Breaking my back to stay just another day in this reality, and another, and another, sweat breaking on the brow...
Breath catching in the throat with a tremulous inhalation of feeling...
There is mystery experienced, but my words don't seem mysterious to me, maybe trying too hard or not hard enough...
Maybe the threshold effect has me firmly in its grasp...
Maybe I take things for granted, digesting every moment in scientifically analytical fashion, trying too hard to impress myself...
Even the stillborn are kept in blank book jars on shelves behind glass for potential future analysis...
So many of them staring lifelessly through the formaldehyde silently waiting for reanimation...
Some things should be in the cremation furnace, but one never knows if there are parts that might one day be useful, repurposed into something greater than they turned out to be...
That box of cables and connectors collected over decades... Memory chips, hard drives, and CPUs...
A closet full of clothes that should go to a Good Will collection bin, but just hang there waiting for relevance...
I feel for these old material things, I imagine some kind of soul in the inanimate, the work of the hands that stitched them, or the injection mold that spat out the parts that were later assembled into likenesses of fictional characters...
Collector's items, physical renditions of some artist or engineer's imagination and craft...
They deserve to continue to exist, don't they?
Or maybe it's just me stubbornly clinging, a grape-sized tick on the neck of a dog...
Freshly extinguished match-head still glowing and placed on mine in hopes I will remove my burrowing mouth parts from the flesh of the past...
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