It is starting to feel good to write again.

How often I say, I can’t complain
and then complain.
My apartment, if you’re reading this
is bigger than yours.
Not to brag.

I asked for the smallest thing they had
and they said here
A place so big you can haunt it.
Watch the sunset through the trees
over my climate Mediterranean balcony

way deep into November.
Even doing it now. Pink light
through spiky little fingers
of pine needles. Yeah, 
yeah I got trees,

they're older than me 
And a cat
so very very very
very fat 
and 

happy?
And I’m not that far behind
and yet
this body always runs
when I ask it to run.

This body always stands up 
when I’ve asked it 
and one day I know
It won’t.
But, baby, you should see me run.

I’m not good, 
but imagine a pony, 
the dumbest 
the dumbest pony you can imagine.
On a beach, happy to be there

just running
running
running
running like it is all it ever wanted to do and all it will ever be happy to do.
Just the happiest and just dumbest fucking pony

heels 
clicking in the air on the up-swing.
Dumbest; happiest 
between miles one and three
this body runs

like it wants me to be happy.
And I know it always won’t.
And I can’t complain 
because sometimes I drive back from the Target
and see this big old hawk hang

big old heavy up there
big old heavy in this white ocean air
Big Old Heavy just lives up there and I
just live out here 
alone 

and just
haunt this big old place and 
I can’t complain
I often say
this place is haunted

I often say
but I can’t complain
Because the square footage and the hawk,
and the Target nearby, and the ocean, the good running.
How often I say 

I just though

can’t complain.

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It is Okay to Be Bad at Stuff.

Very slowly I have been working on a little poetry project. It is nothing to write home about, as I am not a very good poet. But I have been putting together a little collection of poems that I wrote for no reason over the last five years or so. Let me tell you, it is a lot of work because — again — I am not a very good poet.

I have a plan to make a small little book that is very designed. I want the text itself to move around the page and grow or shrink in size and to change fonts and width. I am by no means the first person to do this, but it is kind of a fun little project.

It does mean though  that I am spending a lot of time going through my old writing and so much of it is so very bad. Luckily I have been at this writing thing for so long that it doesn’t hurt my feelings that so much of it is bad. In any creative life, most of what you make will probably suck. This is true for pretty much everybody and I think we should talk about that more; it is okay to suck. What it important is to try. And to keep at it.

Between you and me, I even LIKE some of the bad stuff. If I ever choose to make a project exclusively out of my worst writing, it would be the easiest and largest project of my life.

There is something sort of enjoyable about sitting down with these old poems — old enough that I don’t feel them as mine anymore — and slicing through them with a red pen. There is great precision confidence in a good red pen. The redness makes you feel like you’ve made the proper choice.

I’ll tell you more about this project when there is more to tell. This weekend I’ll spread out all my papers in my dining room and grab at them randomly and slash them with my red pen until the whole room looks like a bloodbath. Should be fun!

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Let’s Talk About Text, Baby!

I’ll be honest here, I’ve been in something of a creative slump for quite awhile now. 2019 was a hard year for me personally and I’m not great at writing my way through adversity. So I didn’t get a lot written. Then 2020 … I had such high hopes as 2020 started. The — you know — there was some more adversity. The anxiety and isolation of the pandemic did not do much for me creatively. I did some stuff, I still made some things, but nothing that was worth anyone’s time.

Now as we are beginning to return to a world filled with interesting and inspiring things, I have been getting prepared. In much the same way that I have been trying to get my body ready again for the world, I have been trying to get my creative brain back in gear again as well. That is part of the reason I have started writing this here little blog again. I know that no one reads it, but I have never really written it to be read. I’ve always written it just for the writing of it. This is the mental equivalent of going to the gym. I just have to do it. I have to rebuild a daily writing practice and I have to reacquaint myself with the simple little joys of typing words on this keyboard. 

It has always seemed odd to me that a writer has to be an idea-haver and then a kind of story structure architect, someone with the loose whimsy to think up people out of nothing, but then also someone expected to have the self-discipline to sit down and write every day, but then also someone who has the dispassionate bloodlessness to slash and edit their way back through the thick damp word jungle that they themselves grew and tended. It is an odd way to exist. You can barely blame writers for having the reputation of being prodigious drinkers. It is a weird way to spend one’s time and life.

And I have been wildly unsuccessful at it. At least lately.

And yet, here I am on a Wednesday morning before work, typing away. Even when there is no inspiration in the fingertips, it is important to still type away. 

And I have  a few ideas. A precious few, but ideas nonetheless. I’ve been trying to tend to them like the sad, constantly dying herb garden I’ve been trying to grow since the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve had about the same success creating as I’ve had gardening, but the lack of success is not the same as failure; failure is giving up, everything else is just learning.

The other day I read a poem that I liked and it has been stuck in my mind for a while. I have been turning it around like a skillfully cut diamond, trying to appreciate the craft of it. This is what I used to always be doing. It feels good to be doing it again.

 

It is hard for me to dive back into long narrative writing, which was always my home for most of my life. So I have been looking at these smaller things lately. One can produce a small collection of poems in a weekend if one is properly energized. I’m not saying they will be good poems, but I have never concerned myself with that sort of thing. 

And I have a three day weekend coming up.

And I have my first late-pandemic out-of-state trip just days after that. 

And I have hope that those things will produce ideas.

And that those ideas might produce words.

And that those words might become text.

And that that text might become something called “writing” and then I will hold that writing above my head and proclaim, “Behold, I am a writer again!’

And then maybe if I say it, I will feel like it again.

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The Smallest Edits.

You know, they have never made a movie about a writer that shows the part when he pulls the stuff out of his typewriter and reads it over and over again for three hours to his disinterested cat and his wine glass, but that is an essential part of the writing process because that is when the smallest edits happen. I would totally watch that movie.

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Cheerio.

If you’re new here then you should probably know that I have a pretty liberal definition of “poetry”. My definition can be extended to - you know - words arranged in some sort of order so as to convey meaning. And stuff.

And - you know - I’m not married to the idea that it needs to have order. Or meaning. Or words, really. One time a dude gave me an old Cheerio that he found in his pocket and I was all like, “This is a fucking beautiful poem!”

So with that in mind: LOOK! NEW POEMS!

(Not here, silly. Down there.)

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A Half-Hearted Apology.

A Half-Hearted Apology
by james bezerra

Please forgive my many
typos and the how poorly
I spell.
When I write these things I think they’re swell!
It is not until
I read them soberly
that I realize I write so abysmally.

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