Yesterday, after Stockton and a workshop in Mays Landing on Blackboard 9, which is not like the Course Management System I have grown accustomed to (which leaves me rather wanting to run off into the woods myself; as I posted on Facebook, “Take me away, Thoreau!” –– how many contradictions can you find in this sentence, gentle reader? But I am large/contain multitudes…), upon picking up a grande regular from the Starbucks, where everyone knows my order (it is waiting behind the counter from the moment I walk in; what happens if I switch to venti iced green tea for the summer months?), before wending my way back down River Road (SP-Mays Landing Road) behind a Sonata with a Jesus-fish that was going just so slow and would STOP. –– at random, leaving me thinking, “This is not how Jesus would have driven, dear,” and came across the Causeway, which sometimes effects the experience of landing on some overdeveloped Eden, sun streaming on cue through accumulated cumulus clouds, I arrived at the Homestead.

My family, including my sister and her new BF, who is doing sound for a show in AC this weekend, went up to the boardwalk/to the Hula Grill, then sauntered back to the Homestead for wine/talk. Our coterie broke up around eight (we were all tired and had places to go), and I came home and almost immediately went to sleep. I slept –– from 9:30-ish until seven just now, which is unheard of, as I almost never have myself a semi-proper lie-in, not even on the weekends. I feel a little exhausted from all the sleep I’ve just had.

And before falling asleep last night, I scribbled out something. As a poet, I realize, I am a bit like the Jesus-fish Sonata…

Why I Am Not A Poet

Thinking
about why not
how I want
to say too much
to you and
that that saying
gets into telling
which doesn’t.

Thinking about
the poets I know
have known
how like

They can be
so delicate
so tender with
an image a
thing

when I just want to
bloviate that
into a long treatise
against/for
something
when I would be
better off
just letting it.

Today
sometimes
with the clouds
and I was pulled
back into that
Awkward Younger Self

when I was a Buddhist
and thought that
silence was
the truest expression
of what matters/
mattered then

When I
would say,
Do not speak;
just listen
to the world
conspiring
with you.

I was happy then
I didn’t know
any better;

I want to
go back
to sitting
on the jetties
and imagining
just nothing

to have that
be enough,

You know?
Darling, when we
stepped out
into the street
catching a cab
take us
to the end

past the end
where it is
more than just
about surviving

Step out
take my hand
with me,

Will you?
(No; I know.
I couldn’t ask that
of you either.)

I am going back
to prose
in the morning.
And you will stay
here, where
it is sometimes
so pretty.