Page and Spine, the long and the short

So, things have been humming along with my writing. I have kind of shifted into writing prose for a bit, but my backlog of poems is periodically getting accepted and published.


I feel the poetry coming back, but there's no particular reason to force it.


Here's a link to the latest pair that got published in an online venue, Page and Spine. They're both eclectic and voluminous, which is probably good for oddballs like me.


Here's the link to the poems


http://www.pagespineficshowcase.com/148/category/all/1.html


"amber of the moment' I started fiddling around with about a year ago, maybe a little less. The title is a line from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five:


                  Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"
                  "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
                  "Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber    with three ladybugs embedded in it.
                  "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

The poem is kind of a short story, which speaks for itself, in broad contours. Sometimes people have very little in common other than their mutual obligations.


"the meaning of enough" is one I wrote a long time ago- it was one of the first poems I wrote when I started back into writing,  in the winter of 2007. It's also kind of a short story. The title comes from some online debate I witnessed about anti-natalism, where someone mangled the Martin Amis quote: "Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough."  I was thinking a lot at the time about how, in many ways, the lives of some mentally ill people are way more heroic than anything I could ever do. The link between those notions formed a story and it seemed to require a pretty tight structure.


It's my wife's favorite poem of mine, an opinion she seemed to be unique in, given responses of various editors over the years. But it has found its home.