The dishes are done. The cat litter emptied. Mother has been given her food and her pills. And all the while I’m pondering how I would answer this question that I have asked myself: “Why do you want to write poetry??”
And this is what I have come to realize:
I don’t WANT to write poetry. What I want is, when I feel COMPELLED (read “inspired”) to write a poem, to know how to make it a really good poem , to energize it with the power of language, technique, form.
That’s why I’m in this workshop.
Poet at Work. Blogger at Process.

Last night, I spent three hours in front of my computer screen, wrestling with that damned #3.
In a time of previous struggle, a friend of mine reminded me that “you can’t push a rope.” My muse is as limp as a rope.
It’s Easter Sunday. It’s Spring. When does bliss become burden?
I resurrect an old poem.
Waiting for the Fall
I was never one to yearn for spring,
the sky too full of eager wings,
the air a burden of song.
Even the ground swells, straining
under a yoke of seeds.
I wake with the winds of autumn,
when a cold sun
fades the trees to clarity,
when the line of the sky
cuts clean and sharp
above the leveled land,
when the earth is a slate
set for the poet