That's Just Insipid!

#1. It's a danger to happiness to mix fatalism with extreme objectivism, otherwise when one discovers the tragedies of life, he resigns himself to their presence and negates the powers of hope and of expectation. I have a friend who once said, when asked if he was still writing poetry, that there just comes a time when there lacks a reason and you stop because it burns itself out. Not having written a poem in a couple months, I nonetheless encounter the possibility of poetry, of my poetry, every day. There is a weary truth to his observation, and respect is due its basis in reality, but without a renewable wonder and faith in the possibilities of language and beauty, even the most bitter poems will go unwritten. To allow them to go unwritten because I've convinced myself that poetry does not live in me like it does not live in most people who used to write but do something else is something I hold convictions against.

I've decided not to allow those fleeting flashes of insight that have occured to me while driving, falling asleep, lifeguarding, or showering to go unrecorded anymore. If this project is worth anything anymore, it is to list them. Each is the germ of a poem (or painting or song or dance), like the coffee bean of ideas from which coffee (prose) or espresso (poetry) is diluted. I'm after the beans.