Monday is for poetry

At least for the rest of this semester.

Today is a better day for perspective and poetry than I've had in a while. I know exactly why, though I don't have time to explore it just at the moment. Class starts soon, and I don't want to spend my whole evening in the computer lab.

Looking at Permeable (which may soon be retitled; right now I'm thinking Needle, since ambiguous noun/verbs are so much fun), I'm still dissatisfied but I can see why and have some idea what to do about it. The pacing at the start of the third stanza is all wrong; it needs more time to build to the frenetic rush of overwhelming, incomprehensible syllables. Not sure how to do that just yet, but I've got some ideas and I'm working on it.

Stanza 4 is powerful as a single line, but almost too cliched to stand alone, so I brought back a bit I'd cut from 3 and hopefully smoothed that transition a bit:

______
They’re only words, after all.
Exhaustion, indecision, insomnia;
the writers’ disease.

So I carve deep into their pathogen
until only pathos remains,
______

And I need something more there, another transition before I'm ready for cats and poetry. I know the gist of it; I need a source of perspective, something to motivate the sudden shift in tone. What's changed? More to the point, why has it changed? Did I learn something, find some peace, just give up? I think it's a little of all of that, and something more as well, something that maybe I don't understand yet and won't be able to write until I do. I think fear has something to do with it, and also maybe authority.

I just love that word. Authority. It needs its own poem. It's a hinge-point in my half-finished villanelle History Of Now. "...and then learned to say we. // It's you with my authority..." I can't remember the rest of that stanza (which means it's probably not worth keeping in its current state), but the basic idea is exploring the sentence "We are." Perhaps it would be worth breaking it out of its meter and seeing how far it could go.

Another little snatch of verse, started yesterday and will likely have some pals to travel with by the end of the week:

______
Promised myself something new,
certain stumbling blocks left behind.
Soft skin against my palms is still
soft skin, and there's nothing new about
my ink-stained hands. Stumbling
to my knees again, salty taste of spring.
Shallow, maybe, but there's so many
uses for skin.
______

Too much repetition right now, and not elegant enough to be a theme, but it feels like it has plenty of room to grow.