this is not a poem

There are one hundred-and-one posts in this blog.  Every one of them is a poem.  Many poems I've never looked twice at.  Some I've hastily edited.  Some I chose for a more careful inspection, and some of those I put into a chapbook I recently made.  This has been an interesting experiment, and I am glad to have done it---it has served me as a writer.

For eight months I haven't had anything more to say.  I am operating a distillery of words.  I used to write the longest, most complicated sentences, and then I'd string them all together one after another.  Maybe it was to prove that I could---that I had the skill to use semi-colons properly, or something?---but this year I haven't wanted string out words like I used to.

This has been my entire life this year.  I have been drawing inward.  It has been a hibernation of self.  I want fewer things.  And by "things," I mean physical objects; I want less stuff.  I want to decrease my territory.  Places I used to drive to without thinking seem a strain, like the strings that tie me to my house are ever-tightening.  Less stuff, less distance, fewer friends.  I am growing insular.  My friends can surely see it, this ever-decreasing world of mine.  I am lucky to have them; I know that.  I will be lucky if they continue to come to me, if their spheres don't shrink too much as well.  I love the friends I have with all of my heart, and it hurts me to see how my insular world is affecting my relationships with them.

And I have fewer words.  Smaller ideas.  Epics are now vignettes, vignettes are tiny thoughts like "these are our things." That one sentence is really all I had to say.

This is me trying harder.  It's not that I will try harder to have more things---that's an aspect of my self-hibernation which I will embrace.  But I will try harder not to draw away from relationships, to continue to build my community, to be a better friend and sister and daughter and wife, when the day comes.  And I will try to write more than a ten-line poem.  I will try to stretch beyond single images, isolated thoughts.

This is me trying harder.  This is not a poem.  This is me trying.