At 7:23am today I will have been on this earth for exactly 42 years.
December 8th 1978 seems a long time ago. And no time at all.
Time is a funny thing that way.
Rushing towards you even as it is rolling on by.
Birthdays are a funny thing, too. They always make me feel reflective but often leave me with nothing of any substance or wisdom to say. Birthdays are more listening than speaking, perhaps.
Just another day in a string of days and nights spent searching.
And I guess forty-two isn’t monumental in any certain sense. Each and every life is different, follows its own pattern, trajectory, path, fabric, and star.
All my life I have been a poet at my core. Everything I write, create, imagine, dream about is, at its heart, in its soul, poetry.
It can be so excruciating to wander the planet with this kind of heart on the sleeve, with these kinds of feathered bones and soft stumbling feet.
All these years, how many times I have killed off and resurrected my own magic, my own desperation. So often I have felt I do not know myself, do not trust myself. Thought that maybe I’m just crazy to try and fit into this hellish earthly place.
But there is so much beauty, too. So much mystery. To be a poet is to trust the voice you carry inside. Submit to it, let it mold you, change you, grow you, expand you.
It’s a weird way to live, to feel, to exist, because you sort of feel like you are trying to express an emotion, or conjure up a vision that no one else can ever understand.
And somehow you know this, deep down. You know it is futile.
But when you are born this way, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times your little poet body swings around the sun.
There will always be a fascination which borders on obsession going on inside of you as you braid your soul into the love and the fear.
Even after all these years, I want to inhabit myself.
Even if it never fully satisfies.
Even if it scares me.
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Photo: self portrait