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Confessions of a Poetry Blogger


Would one be more prone to stumble upon and stay with my blog if it was less poetry and more prose? On the rare occasion that I have mentioned that I ramble around inside the forest of what are limitless blog panes of nostalgia and blog house decorating tips, blog news of romance and exits from blog homes to new url addresses put to the screen like fine needlepoint, and someone says to me, oh you post poems?, I have to pause. 

 Still I am encouraged that among the fierce holdouts, women I know who swallow novels whole like savoring the last important paragraphs against the end of the world, even these smart ones are beginning to also dine on poems.  I mean let's face it, our insecure midnight diaries penned as girls and the jackknife initialing of picnic tables by brutish almost men, were those torrid entries not haiku? Isn't the graffiti that adorns street signs, Stop War, Speed Hump Me, not a riddle which closely resembles a limerick? And does not a limerick follow a strict meter? 

 What I'm simply trying to evoke, then, my sole, patient blog follower is that even the step of the stranger in front of you on the lawn of this autumnal day, even that busy pretty head at the stoplight might be singing something softly to himself that closely resembles this open palm of a prose poem that I present to you now as an experiment of sorts sipping double bergamot earl grey in the smock of a undaunted poet who sleeps late into the day so that she might fleece her dreams of metaphor. These are the secret trap doors, the Cheshire cats, the alleyways of prose that share a spliff with the slam artist who sidles up next to your waiter on a break who just wants to drink the last of the chardonnay left by patrons in deep glasses that tastes like, well, dare I say, it, a poem. 

 Is this easier to enter into then, these blocks of fonts? Come on, don't be shy. Write me a postcard. I have a the perfect line break and a commemorative stamp waiting. I promise to punctuate your paragraphs with Crayola so you spot the sun between the trees. Then I will recall an old diary entry and share that too if it pleases you. Anything to urge you to read between the lines and then go back the actual ones, indented like curved and dotted lines on a road map with no other signposts but their sound.

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