Everyone "is" on facebook!

But there's not much to be said there, everything running down the screen so quickly, so dramatically, all the political anger about the Arizona ban on ethnic studies and forced racial profiling etc. I have ADHD and can only take in so much at a time; my attention span is limited. I am slow in taking in things, as well as dispensing anything. My memory is shot too, but non-the-less, I am here to blog, primarily to myself, since it's more my pace. Writing stuff on the blog in the morning is a habit I guess. A nice slow start. I need to make writing poems a similar habit in the morning. I go to work at 7-11 in two hours. So, I will try to write some poems too, or drafts I mean before I leave. I've already journaled a bit privately. See, I don't put everything here. If I did, I'd be locked away or something.

There's no dialogue here too. So, it's as someone once said to me, we write primarily to be heard. And even if nobody listens, maybe there's something to be said for feeling like one's being listened to, imagining an audience. That's why we write, I think, to be heard and seen, to be less invisible. The best reason I've heard is from Wallace Stevens who said something to the effect that we write to help others live. Maybe those of us who are heavily neurotic write to help ourselves live and in the process inadvertently help others live too.

Back to the blog. It's like when you send poems out and realize the errors, weaknesses, drawbacks and furiously revise and send them out again, only to discover other weaknesses or that you liked it better before the changes. I'd like to post stuff I write here, but it's all drafts and mishaps, and it's like when I read it initially I like it, but when I read it later it's like, "oh god, that really sucks."

I don't know. I've written two drafts of poems the last two days, and sometimes feel like my language is too flat or that I'm trying to say something "important" or "profound" but it's really a confused fog of uncertain meandering. I think sometimes we try to sound like we know something when we don't know anything, or what we "know" is of little help to anyone else, even ourselves. The uselessness of language when we are puffed up or shrinking in fear is on my mind when I say these things.

I've struggled with writing. That said, it's time to do my time with the poetry. I do miss it, but sometimes it feels like one can never get back to where one was, and I think of that aphorism that one can't step in the same river twice. It is of necessity that our work must change in some significant way. And change is, as J liked to say, change is the one thing which we can count on. And "why" do I feel ridiculously middle class or lower middle class when I end a sentence with a preposition or when I say "poetry" the way I do or "poem" with what some up East said was an unusual emphasis on the "e", more like "poim". And why not be proud of such a thing?

Class is always on my mind when I reflect on poetry, but that said, I need to go write something, no matter how bad, I need to engage with language for 30 minutes.