Pot Roast and Poetry

It's time, more than time, to try finalising another book-length poetry manuscript together and to send it off: "Awa' with ye, ye maggoty nightmare beastie!"

It's not that I don't have poems. My problems, challenges, I feel almost all stem from a perceived lack of time for my creative self and far too much of myself put into the press and its doings. I need time to play with my poems and poetry. Feel that I don't get enough time with them or my other creative writings. I need time to work, rework, edit my poems. Need to shake 'em up. See what falls off, what holds. Should read them aloud. Hear if they whisper or hum or sing or clunk. Need to nurture and prune them to better blooms.

Then I need to string or bunch them together. Make a stook of them before shipping the poor poems off to try to find-get someone to make them into a book. Some plucky publisher still open to Canadian poetry. I have need of a new book. My publisher in Beograd wants to see something new. They can apply for translation grants only for professionally published books. They might publish without the translation grant but why not enrich the project for both of us?

Sand-spreading trucks busy on the Fredericton roads and parking lots at this pre-dawn time. Slick, wet, black ice under the cold rain in our bowl of fog. Better than freezing rain (and that might be happening up on the hills or in northern New Brunswick).

I have a pot roast to cook for lunchtime. Have everything ready. Dutch oven pot on the stove awaiting my attention. First, brown the piece of meat on high heat. Next, put in diced tomatoes, a minced jalapeno pepper, garlic cloves, some beer or red wine (and some for myself—sun is over the yardarm in Beograd), cumin or sonoran seasoning . . . and leave to simmer for two hours. Add carrots, cored parsnip, spuds, turnip, sauteed onion, celery, whatever . . . Forget about it for another hour . . .

. . . and return to the poems or poetry manuscript, if possible, and don't get caught by application form financials and the bookkeeper/accountant, tax reports and returns, sales logs, email, business telephone, incoming faxes.

If not poetry, try a little reading or daydreaming . . . on a boat on a calm river, with a friend or a group of friends, beer or wine in hand, sun with scattered clouds, warm afternoon, talking and laughing and loving life. Something good outside the boxes lived in, lived out of, watched and staring back at you.

shirt: two black long-sleeved ones
loc: comCtr
temp: 2 C, raining, foggy
sound: Blues Traveller, Straight On Till Morning