poetry as bloodmucking

I'm in the horse latitudes of creativity...by choice. I've read my recent works and decreed that I am in a toxic zone.

I don't like being in a toxic zone.

The best thing I can do when those moods come upon me is to stop writing, focus on editing and site revisions and other non-provocative things, and allow that part of me that is spewing bile to drown in it. Intellectually, emotionally, it is pretty brutal and messy. But, fortunately, I'm the only one who has to witness it. I don't like muddying my legacy with the demons. It ticks me off enough that I have them, I don't have to let them out to play.

So, for the next day or so, the workaday part of me will take over operational control of my life while the creative side in me is busy beating it's own offspring to death with a large thigh bone of some extinct beast. Ugly but necessary. Actually, it's pretty cool to watch inside my own head, all I have to do is kick back into play any stray mobiles.

First up, I am doing some retrofitting on my website The City of Legends. Just some design changes, mostly colour, to begin with. Grey and white are the new black, and aqua is going away over the next few days...

then I will be making some wholesale changes to the poetic contents.

Check by from time to time and see what I do. It isn't as interested in watching the batter-scarred immortal thwacking on a bile-spitting pitfiend, but it is much cleaner. Do you have any effing idea what it cost to get ichor out of suede? And, I will have you know, I do my own laundry, even when I have a lover. Which I do't, right now, which is another reason to slap the free-willed incubi within me around for fun.

It gets pretty grim. But as my old editor, Jan Innes used to say about me, I don't write poetry. I live it. I actually feel sorry for the people who don't have to wrestle with the adrenaline surge of throwing oneself from an impossible emotional height to dive at the jagged, ragged rocks below, tempting fate and sanity. They don't really live life, they just occupy space. And force housing prices up.

::Thwack::

Sorry, one of the smaller hellhounds was just running around my chair...had to kick back into the void. As I was saying...

I got an email today from the local Barnes & Noble, something about West Virginia Day next month and wanting to have writers from the state do appearances at their store. Why not? At least they, unlike the Monongalia County Schools, the Morgantown Public Library and West Virgina University, seem vaguely aware of my presence. My ego isn't bruised, I am just perplexed at the wasting of resource.

"The existence of a single atheist does not disprove the existence of God." Their failures do not change my nature.

Hold it...

::Thwack:: ::Thwack::

Sorry, something slimy was trying to tie my shoelaces together as a prelude to eating my leg. Gotta run...the hellmouth is leaking. I have to go stand in the tea chest and sing "Jerusalem".

"And did those feet, in ancient times..."