When do you think it’s ok to admit you’ve made an irretrievable mess of your life?

At what point do you declare the game piece broken, toss it aside, and look around for a substitute — a penny, a piece of wood, a piece lifted from another game?

Must we assume that every trial ennobles everyone, or are some people born to shuffle?

Is the capacity for hope always supposed to triumph? Or are some of us supposed to be object lessons?

Insomnia.

I have literally been awake all night. I try to sleep and I can’t.

Been working on the Chinatown poem all night, staring at it, thinking about it.

If it’s true that every poem written, every poem performed, should be treated as though it was your last work, should be treated as though it was the last thing you could point at and say, “that was me” — well, I should have died years ago; because I write the same poem over and over, and have for the last five years, and I can’t seem to stop.

I’ve written some marginally better stuff lately, but I can tell when a phase is ending, and it is; and I no longer believe in my own capacity for self-renewal.

Too many male poets lose their edge in middle age, and become masochistic whiners or esoteric fops, chasing arcane visions. I swore long ago to become neither.

But I need to recuperate and rebuild to get past it. And I’m so tired and I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what to do next.

___________________________________

In this movie a woman who is her sister’s mother
gets shot by a cop and her sister-daughter is
put in the care of her grandfather
and her father who are one man.

Another man drowns and another one
has his nose slit open by a man who
(in real life) raped a 13 year old girl
and lost his wife to a serial killing mob
of hippies.

All anyone can think to say
at the end of the movie is “Forget it, Jake,
it’s Chinatown,” as if the climate was responsible,
or maybe the people themselves, even though
you barely see anyone Chinese in that final scene,
and everything awful is brought to a climax
by these people blaming the locals, these people
who came from somewhere else whose job
is about moving the blame. They move the blame so well
you can’t tell east from west.

You turn off the TV after the credits
but the movie
never ends, everyone of them is in bed
with everyone of them,
all the good people are drowning
and parents are siblings and ogres at once.
And it goes on forever.

Eventually you discover
the secret of their success:
everywhere you are
is their Chinatown, and
those long red dragons
and mysterious omens
and snappy explosions for a happy new year
are not, in fact, meant for you.

Public journaling is not diary-keeping. More akin in spirit to personal zines, blogging is by design a public act.

Therefore, statements that “it’s in my journal and therefore people have no right to be offended if I say it” are disingenuous at the least and dishonest at the outside.

We’re leaving aspects of filtering, etc. out of this for the basis of this argument.

that Sandra Day O’ Connor has submitted her retirement to the Prez.

Let the games begin.