Now, I am circulating another manuscript collection. It's a good, coherent collection of poems. We will see.
I feel so good about my life today. I am a poet! Ha! What a great circumstance!
I love reading difficult books, listening to arcane classical music (and to schmaltzy popular music too,) learning a new language, taking careful walks, corresponding with friends, binge-streaming television and movies, drinking coffee, taking virtual tours of art museums, doing crossword puzzles, listening to academic podcasts, writing novels and poems, all of it.
It is a good life.
I will never be famous. I will never be rich. I will not change the world.
I have, like everyone else, made terrible mistakes of which I am horribly ashamed.
But I am also proud of the good work I have done.
Here's a poem from the manuscript I am shopping. (If you can help my book get published before I die, that would be very cool.)
Thankless
(first published in Badlands)
I know I
should be miserable,
a
sixty-year-old private man,
whose job it
is to mop the floor
of this
fashionable restaurant,
a man with
an expensive education
and the easy
command
of several
languages.
But the late
summer afternoon
buzzing
outside the window glass
has cooled
to a fragrant dusk,
and the
meteor cars,
their
headlights suddenly bright
in the
darkening day,
chase each
frantically
to the same uncertain
eternity,
while the
wet floor glistens and dries
like a piece
of polished silver,
and I am
satisfied with my task.
