In Front Of Us

My "about me" has been changed because I'm joining another write a poem every day in February and created a blog and forgot that if I change an "about me" there, I change it here.  Oh well.  I think by now you know who I am.

Yesterday on my way to work, traffic was stalled and there was bits of car detritus all over the road.  Then I saw a deer lying leap-forward in the breakdown lane and a car with its front all smashed in.  So sad...the deer looking as if he would just about make it.  I've been thinking about death lately--some one's partner died yesterday as well.  I keep thinking about the line in front of us--how great grandparents and grandparents and our own parents sort of keep death at bay--it's way in front of us.  But then it keeps getting closer.  I hate that I have to tell my son that, yep, we die (although hopefully I'm a bit more gentler than that).  We're all on this unstoppable ramp.  Death thoughts--gotta shake them loose, I guess.

So yeah, I'm gearing up to write again--hopefully better than last time.  I failed pretty miserably last time and I'm nervous about this round.  I don't have a series that I'm writing toward so that's nerve-wracking.  It's tough floundering around at the beginning, writing stuff that is yucky while figuring out what's going on.  Part of the process. 

I'll be posting my own next big thing here shortly.  I keep wanting to rename it the next sort of smallish thing...

Dispatch Detailing Rust

I was merely on
the cusp of growing
old when I shook
his hand, my enemy's
hand, twelve years
ago & secretly gloated
over its frailty, its liver
spots & now I own
two enemy hands
of my own.

Sometimes now, these
hands of mine stroke
a steel blue dream that
will instantly inhabit rust.
Then they regain sanity,
become old bluebirds
in the blue sigh of sky.


  Adrian C. Louis

New Letters
Volume 79, No. 1