addressing ROAD TRIPS, poems

It became a long pondered decision. Should I address in interviews the content of my book, ROAD TRIPS, poems, and talk about "the process"... or should I let the words marinate inside the readers' heads and allow conclusions to develop based on their own perceptions? Those who write poetry usually do not like to discuss the internal dialogue that was present as the work was composed. Poets are private, we tend to keep the pieces close and try hard not to pull back the curtain. 

After I received feedback that referred to my work as "self pity," I was gobsmacked. I realized even prior to that message that many readers were concluding my book was autobiographical and I never interfered with that perspective.  But were they thinking my heartfelt work was an exercise in which I was feeling sorry for myself instead of a somewhat fictional prevarication and at the same time layered with nostalgic partial truths of my own journey? Were my road trips disingenuous?

I regretted not writing the work differently with more precise clarity and in the third person... to distance myself from the narrator of the poems and thereby allow more of the emotions to be relatable and not to be concluded only as a personal reflection of my own life and memories. The lucid dreams were built on a quiet fever fantasy within my solitude during the end of 2020, when we were all still greatly impacted by COVID, and my imagination drifted to places where I created limited and carefully controlled fanciful bends in the road which took me to almost hallucinogenic places within tricks and mind games of a mental kaleidoscope.

Here is the difference in what might have been:

The strong wind knocked something 

Over and when I looked through the 

Window and saw under a streetlight 

The way he was looking at her,

I realized life had passed me by.

The strong wind knocked something 

Over and when she looked through the 

Window and saw under a streetlight 

The way he was looking at her,

She realized life had passed her by.

In any event, I thought about great literature that evokes sadness. I know it is what is referred to as "the soul of a poet" that drives many to create sorrowful work... And for me, there exists no work so melancholy as James Joyce's THE DEAD. Here is a short excerpt from the end of that masterpiece:

"... One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age..."

"... His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling."

"... The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

I remain still fascinated by streetlights. A particular streetlight that is my favorite appears in the picture above. If time travel is possible, it seems to me that it could only happen if the traveler stood under a beautiful streetlight at night. 

I read today that the TV show, Quantum Leap, is coming back in the fall. So I am not the only one who perceives the past as a fascinating heady destination. 

On the lighter side: