blackening...

all morning i've been painting and taking a red pen to poems-in-progress. there's some pretty good stuff in that stack... i'm just not sure how to make them really shine. i've let them breathe long enough and would like to get back to work on them. it feels like it's been a long time since i "seriously" wrote something. if i've ever really been serious about it, i'm not sure, but this time last year there was such a huge fire in my belly and i had to write it out. now, i sift ashes, looking for fragments worth dusting off, polishing and re-planting somewhere else.

i suppose a poem is never quite perfect and i spend a lot of time beating myself up about that fact, thinking it's only my poems that are never perfect and that maybe if i was smarter or prettier or frailer or anything-er, the poems would be better. silliness.

and i turned one of my paintings black. i was nervous to do it but i'm glad i went ahead and got brave. there's a mood now in the work and an availability for a wide open narrative that i really like. in fact, i'm thinking of making it blacker... like a super underexposed photograph or a memory you can't quite see... just feel.