the grateful live

My first great love, Psyche (if you don't know my totem muses, this may be a little confusing to you...E.J. wrote a wonderful treatise on the identities and aspects of my totem-muses, which appears on my website The City of Legends), predicted that as I grew older I would become bitter, as poetry would never be successful again, and she did not want to watch me grow old and bitter about my love for it.

Well, poetry has been very good to me, not as financially rewarding as I would like, but I'm still working on that, refining the process. But after 8 books (two more, later this year, bringing it to 10), a CD, an international recognition as a poet of note, an honor or two from schools and states and organizations and some extraordinary people intersecting with my life, bitterness is hardly the word I would use. I'd lean more towards grateful.

On the personal front, there may be moments of that tinge, but I am working behind the scenes, manipulating myself, arguing down those aspects of me that may feel rejection or pain from relationships where, as often as not, I chose unwisely or hastily, allowing pheremone and hormone to over-rule the more judicious parts of my spirit.

Of course, I would never want to be so cold and mechanical as to be that way with people, where I pick my friends and lovers on a ledger sheet of sanity and mutual support. Have I enjoyed being the transitional man? Well, the short terms joys are great, the sense of accomplishment is mighty, but the long term pain is grim. It can lead to bitterness.

But I still possess the capacity to sublimate my emotions, my pain, my regret into the pure essense of emotion, and use it as the lambent fuel of my creativity. And I burn, if not brighter than ever, at least as brightly.

So, Psyche, as your birthday approaches in just a few weeks, let me say you were wrong, perhaps even because your words, your lack of faith, inspired me to what I have done and become, but irregardless, I still would trade it all for an honest, earnest and worthy kiss.

But that's what makes me a poet. And, as the one I most often give credit for my initial recognition of that evolution and transcendence, I thank you, for Psyche is, in so many ways, the mother of this poet's soul.