Wednesday and I am up and around quite early for me having completed my rising rituals, breakfasted and taken my morning meds. This morning is all about getting new poems onto my YouTube Channel: PROST8KANCERMAN. I try to rig my laptops so that I can use one as an auto prompt, but I am not sure it works that well, however I post three new unpublished poems. I hope people like them. I have put them here on the blog so you do not have to hunt around for them but by all means share them.
For those interested in following up about Spoon Theory here is the wikipedia link to the subject, but there are lots of articles and posters by all sorts of organisations on the internet. It has become really popular due to its accessibility in terms of understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
By lunch time I am done but I wonder if this flurry of video activity is my way of dealing with the fact that I might have to read a poem in public in March. Ideally I would learn one by heart so I could just perform it but memorising stuff was never my forte. I could get the emotional gist of things and some of the hooks but I was always better at holding onto visual material. That’s one of the aspects of my dyslexia.
After my morning of YouTubing and post lunch I decide to do just one more video. It takes an age to get it any where near right plus the fact that I had got bored with my green ice hockey training jersey and decided to go for the real thing and let my hair down. My vow not to have my hair cut after it all fell out after chemo has left me with the long flow I now have but I am very disinclined to have it tampered with as for me it is a powerful visual reminder of how long I have been fighting and winning, something I think the poem reflects.
Finally I have had enough, I’ve probably done more than I should so I take to drafting the blog and playing with the technology to try and get things roughly right. I’m not going for “professional” after all there is no such thing as living a professional life only of being a professional within ones life. It would be ludicrous to set out to live a “professional” life unless one interprets that as aspiring to some sort of ethical, principled lifestyle in which everything is perfect. My experience is that I fuck up and I am not even sure I know what a perfect/professional life would look like. I always relied upon the maximization of error to maximize learning most of my life, I’m unlikely to stop now. There or there about will have to do me. Not that I would not want the doctors, dentists and trades people of the world not to do their best. But I guess that’s being professional not living a “professional” life.
In this day there are real world things to attend to like the Tesco order and a football match to watch later in the evening along side a lot of little chores, like bringing in the bins, that need to be attended to. I do attend to the chores but have time to continue reading Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems 1968 – 2014. I suppose it is inevitable that as poets age the content of their poems include more and more “learnt stuff”, by which I mean the experience of their culture, what they have read and who they have met. Some of the poems become cascades of names and illusions to others work and associations between events. Some how the straight forwardness of experience seems to get wrapped differently. I maybe making a broad generalisation but that is how it seems to me, and I wonder if that has happened to me, especially lately. I hope not, I would like to think that I could write about the experiences I am trying to capture without comparison to others or using others work as the counterpoint to my own, but I know that occasionally the work of other poets sneak into my own verses. Tomorrow I see the hand therapist for another session to see how well my hand is healing after my operation on the 30th of January. I am hoping the bandage can come off completely so that I can get both hands wet and start back into training. I suspect she will once again remould my night splint. So I get into the rest of my day, head for the evening and my night meds.
