I have arisen with the same discontent I pulled in with me under last night’s covers. A sad sense of knowing that a yearning is ever out of reach. It seems the more I rail against the poetry I read that is read and wonderfully accepted by the periodicals and anthologies of just the past few years, the further away I seem to be in mind.
I want them to be perfect. I need them as a light to shine the way. And so I pick my way among them, find a nugget here and there but mostly rock. My tales are not of struggles of the masses of oppressed, or dreamlike images of a pretty foreign land. My footsteps follow those that have long settled neath the earth, covered, like the sheets above my head.
Poetry has taken on a torch I want to hold, and yet my words are more likely to be crisped by flame. What am I seeking, why do I fight, or is it something that I shall never comprehend? At least I must know this and look up to the light to see more clearly what I am and what I’m not.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology