A long time gone

I haven't been here in a bit, but that's okay.  I would rather do that than blather some nonsense every day.  I've been reading poetry, mostly.  I found a book by David Berman, "Actual Air" that has a lot of good lines in it.  I mentioned before that I really like good lines, and this one has a bunch of them.  It was a really good exercise, because after a bit I realized that the good lines where the best part of the poetry.  The rest left something.  I wish I knew what it was.  With Mark Strand, the good lines are in service of the poem.  For David, not so much.  The good lines in his book were almost self-congratulatory.  I liked his stuff, but not as much as Mark's. 

Then I started reading X=, by Stephen Berg.  I picked it up at the library and flipped through it, thinking it was pretty readable.  After I got into it a bit, I realized that every line of every poem in the book starts with "he".  For some reason, that really put me off.  I couldn't read the rest of the book once I realized that.  I wonder what he got from referring to the third person like that?  I think part of the reason it put me off was that I lived in a dissociated state until I was 29.  I never referred to myself in the first person.  It was always in the third person.  Nothing every happened to me, it happened to "him."  Oh well.  No poems this time.  I have a couple I'm working on, but they're not ready yet.  I hope all of you have a good New Years, and that the coming year is better than the last one.

Scattered thoughts

The semester is coming to an end, and I'm glad.  I have one final, but it shouldn't be too bad, then a break until the next term starts.  I've actually been trying to write some, although I haven't liked a lot of what I've written.  I'm tired a lot lately, which is probably a combination of the semester and the depression.  I wonder if I'll ever shake that completely.  Who knows.  Anyway, I did a couple more that are sort of okay, so here they are.  Feel free to comment, and I'll try to respond.

Hope for Half?

Chasing words across a page

  finding the ones that fit

The perfect one that suits the stage

  words of wisdom or words of wit?

c. 2011 C. Thames

That one kind of speaks for itself.  I always wonder what they're going to mean.  In that one, I stopped asking and just wrote it. The next one had a little more thought involved, although not THAT much.

Water in a Small Lake

The water in the small lake

   stays the same

It ices over, then comes back

   now and then sprouting ducks

Essentially unchanged

   under the surface

Presume fish, some algae

   weeds on the bank

A random flower

   never in the same place

The water doesn't change

   it's always

     water.

c. 2011 C. Thames

That should do it for now.  More to come.