The Big Whatever

I should start out by saying that I don't know what I am doing here. I got this notion a while back to restart my personal blog, and then decided that I wouldn't. I instead decided to start working on a writing project that I have come to call 100 days of writing. I call it that because that is what it is. Every day for 100 days I am going to write something. I am on day 31, and in many ways I feel I am already reaching my limit. It is hard to come up with something new to say every day, but I am almost a third of the way done and still have plenty of ideas.

I want to write about places that were important to me as a child or young adult. I want to write about the last time I was in Springfield Mall as that place was very important to my development, but I feel I need to revisit these places and it is impossible to revisit a place that is gutted. Springfield Mall as a mall is no more. It is now anchor stores that will soon be part of a town center. The last time I was there it was all white hallways with all the stores boarded up behind the whiteness, and I kept wondering if they looked as I remembered them behind the drywall. It was Springfield Mall of a bad horror movie and not the Springfield Mall of my youth and that is what I wanted to write.


One of the rules for this 100 days of writing thing is that each work must be completed on the day it is started. Even if it isn't truly finished when that day ends that piece of work is final. Maybe I feel these pieces about the places of my youth deserve more time. That they are too ambitious for this little experiment, but if I do not write them now then I may never do it, and that is why I should do it.

There are other things though. While working on this latest project I looked back at some older pieces that I had written towards the end of my college career. I opened up my old laptop, removed its hard drive, and threw together what I figured was my best work into an anthology and published that on Amazon. I ended up calling it The Fractured and other poems. You can purchase it here if you wish.

That is another reason I started this blog. For shameless self promotion. I've worked hard to promote myself through Twitter and slightly less hard to do so on Facebook, but it feels like I need another outlet. An outlet that is somewhat more private and not as in your face as those. Something were I can offer a little bit of value to go along with the shameless self promotion. I won't put too much of my work out there as I want people to pay for it, but modern society works in a way where so much is given away for free people won't buy anything unless they get a sample.

I wrote this poem on day 29. It is about my confusion with myself. After I finished college I went to Europe and then six months later went back. After that I started taking yearly trips through America, and I've seen a bit of the world, but for some reason I wrote nothing about this. While I was in college I must have written close to 1000 poems, and if it wasn't it was a lot as it took me awhile to shift through them for that above mentioned anthology. Anyway while I saw all these interesting sights around the world never once did I get a notion to write about it, and in more than a few ways this confuses me. Maybe it is because now I am writing again and I find it easier to find inspiration or that I looked back at my work and saw this machine like effort for those years, but then the between years are a gap of emptiness although very interesting things were happening to me. I can't explain it so I wrote about it.

My Lost Years

I’ve drunk carbonated wine from Dixie cups lost on the streets of Paris,

rode a train through the Swiss Alps, stood in the French Rivera and

exclaimed it as the most beautiful place.

I’ve seen il Duomo, David, and all the art in the Uffizi,

the Sistine Chapel, Coliseum, the Pantheon and the Parthenon

I’ve looked down on Athens from the Acropolis and

ventured out to the oracle at Delphi and Agamemnon’s tomb.

I’ve stood among the destruction of Pompeii and wandered the

streets of Amsterdam in layers of altered states.

I’ve stood outside the door of Notre Dame,

seen the unfinished cathedral of Siena, and

stood on the top most floor of the monastery of St. Francis of Assisi

and in that moment I understood complete devotion to God.

I’ve driven through the desolation of the Mojave Desert,

seen the urban prairies of East St. Louis, and stood on the banks

of the Mississippi there and in Minneapolis.

The tar pits of LA, the pier of Saint Monica, and the Golden Gate

of San Francisco I’ve visited them all in my journeys.

I’ve ridden the El over rooftops of Chicago and walked the

Strip District in the city of bridges and steel.

I’ve heard the silence of the Liberty Bell and walked the

battlefields where liberty was won and defended.  

I’ve seen a bit of the world, but in that time poetry was lost to me.

Not a word, not a single word I can find.

No feelings or thoughts or reasons remain among my notes.

I was there and witnessed sights I may never see again,

but I could not hear the inspiration in the wind, and not once

did I attempt to add my whisper to the shouts of eons past.

The window to the room where Keats died was pointed out

on a bus tour through Rome,

and I treated it a passing curiosity.