Secrets in Public

It almost seems like there’s no reason to write blogs anymore. Our brief prosaic ramblings, lyrical and strange, and holding back little, seem to be a tad too much now, too extra. We have Facebook and Twitter and all the ways of speaking into the unearned conch. We embrace our typos and talk too much and say, Look! This happened! in so many different ways that it seems like it’s time to stop blogging all together. 

Still, I’m attached, if only because after weeks of the word output, the constant composing and the constant reading, the blog still seems like a safe place to hang my head and hum to myself.

This summer, I read more books than I ever have in one concentrated period of time. I told my dad that I thought I had earned, or should earn, a PhD. Then, later I had a dream that I got a PhD and I was so happy about being in school, except I didn’t do my math homework and my childhood friend, Sarah, had to help me cheat before class. This is the way the brain works overloaded in words. Every word is a trigger to tell more, or tell it again. Every ordinary bug is a new reason to stare and dream and make things fly off.

I didn't earn a PhD, but I did learn something. A sort of cherishing. I’m not as scared as I once was of how the words come to me in different ways. I used to worry if what I thought was a poem, came out in prose or vice versa, but now as I get older (and seemingly simultaneously easier and harder on myself), I find myself just so pleased that they come at all. And come they did. As I was reading so many poems, more poems came. And as I took a break for fiction, more fiction came. And essays and tweets and tantrums.

After all of the deluge, the books and the dreams, I have a new manuscript of poems. We shall give it a bit a of time to simmer and see how the world unfolds, but for now I’ll just tell this secret place, this hidden old school whisper machine I call my blog.