an introspective Saturday with my edits and my memories

Now I remember why the three books I did last year almost killed me: Editing. I hate editing.

I'm in the final edits for "101 Great Erotic Poems"...still eerie doing a book like this when between relationships. Aside from a couple brief make-out sessions with a charming friend, I have been as monkish as humanly possible (without surgery) for the past 30 months...how am I possible? The drive is there...stronger than ever, but the aversion therapy of my last major relationship is still like phantom leg pain, real but inexplicable...I find my ability to judge people's intentions and motives and feelings towards me compromised, and therefore suspect.

Of course, I have always been this way to some extent. Most of my relationships started with an overt cue from a woman. (How overt? How about showing up on my doorstep in a long t-shirt and leg warmers? That overt.)

I am piqued and strangely bemused that I may end up remaining ronin for the rest of my life, but I accept the possibility. Not that I am without women of interest in my life, women who drive me to write poetry, even. A pantheon of rich diversity, richer than ever before in my life.

And, as I step to the third person, a pantheon I find myself warily circling, ever mindful of the pain and brutality of the human heart. I am distrustful. Those are hard words in the mouth of the amomancer, but true words.

I have lost faith. Terrifying. The priest of passion no longer believes in the sacrament. No that's not true. He believes in it, he just no longer takes it. That is a truer allegory.

One old friend said it is of my own nature, that I have stepped out of the mainstream of life. I am now no longer human to those who know me well, but practically an abstraction, an archetype. No flesh and blood to love, but blackened bones and angel's wings and otherworldly choirs. I am transcending myself, fulfilling the prophecy of my old poem "My Electric Lady". It is true that those who know my works treat me with a different spectrum of emotion than those I obscure it from, perhaps as with Joe Gideon I can be adored, but not loved. I hope he is full of crap. I miss the ten thousand sensations of giving, receiving, making and being in love...in this living tomb of emotional detachment, I can only recall them, not really feel them.

Perhaps this is the beginning of sorrows...too much to do to contemplate this for now.

...back to the edits.