Starting With Intent to Finish

Start it with a poem about drinking. About a long, dark porter
and sly slow slurp. The real, hard, anger of salt.
Then go to your most detatched, your commentator newscast.
Don't get your hands dirty, wear clean gloves. Comment on the sun,
raying out over the hood of a dented buick. As you stand there with
a microphone in a suit your 17 year old self still protests, make
that buick glinting your goal.
aspire.
Talk it good so people forget all about the
drinking poem. Write the light so hard that you are
a tee-totaler, always were. Write yourself celibate
on forests that you camped under the day before
yesteryear, punctuate with a poem about acid rain.
Go righteous. Go fist pumping.
Then, write the sex poem-filthy and needed--
before writing the monsters out of the closet
and back under the bed where they belong.

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blogspot will probably wreak havoc with the format of this, but so goes. I wrote this on tuesday at the SPLAB meeting I facilitated on Writing Goals. This is as it was in the minute, and as a freewrite, I'm pretty happy with both how it feels and what I was "trying to say" about both the process and product of writing new poetry in the new year.