Poems I've been Meaning to Write

Not sure if it is meaning or needing to write. I have failed miserably at my last several attempts to participate in a daily poem challenge (I need to ask Arlene to make a virtual me with a dunce cap). It seems either I run out of steam or I cannot keep up with commenting, or the words start to consume everything else and I lose the thread of my everyday life. I begin to miss my friends, my quiet time, and my photography time. Either way I have been experiencing the biggest poetic lull in nearly 3 years. I do however have several hundred poems that would benefit from the investment of time and craft, a couple of stalled writing projects, one draft chapbook, completed, commented on and simply needing me to revise, an outline for a full length manuscript, an outline for a book of short stories, nearly 50 pages of a draft novel and not to forget that damn partridge in a pear tree. I also have over 10,000 photos that I would like to explore. Honestly though I tend to only like about 20% of my poems and about 5% of my photos, but I don't quite have the courage to just delete the extraneous.

I have discovered of late I need to make lists to get anything done in a productive manner. The entire idea of lists is counter productive to my entropic way of dealing with all things, and honestly a bit of a long overdue comeuppance for me. I have relied my entire life on that organic computer, have never kept an appointment book, never had to make a list other than a mental note, and most of the time have never forgot anything or missed anything of real importance. I have an uncanny ability to sense time, an internal chronometer and a revolving calendar in my brain, a internal check box, that has not required any external prompts. I generally do write things down, but as a way of re-enforcing the mental, if I hear, see it, write it, it is mine. Then I throw the appointment card away, the jot sheet and manage a year later to show-up on time to have my teeth cleaned. I don't use a watch or an alarm clock. I can tell you what time is it--within 5 minutes. Day planners, calendars, etc are as foreign to me as driving on the left side of the road. Once I had to take one of those Covey classes, on effective time management (was a requirement of employment) and it damn near threw me over the edge. Colored pens, priority codes, and flipping pages, it was like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone. I threw the planner away after about 30 days and drank an entire bottle of wine. That was the pre-mid-life me.

The mid-life me has been experiencing blips in my internal chronometer, has actually forget things, has began to keep lists. I have been fighting the signs of the time so to speak. I love being 46, have come into my own in my mid-life, accepted that beautiful sense of self that accompanies middle age, the sense of reconnecting with the child of your youth, the knowledge of what is most important, the full joy of living each day, that you gain. I have been that last holdout in believing that you also begin to lose a bit of short-term memory, as if your hard drive is near full, and you constantly have to clear cache. I fell hard, I had to buy a book--not a calendar, not a day planner, but simply a bound composition book, one that I can keep all of my jots in, one that when I have a time crunch, I make and prioritize my internal list to paper, so if I get distracted and unfocused (I have a bad case of middle-age ADD) that I can refer to. My best friend who is my safest of all houses, where I can go and be the big goober that I am, said to me when I complained/whined/pouted/cursed about this phenomena, simply said; it's about damn time, Brenda Sue.

See. Exactly. I started out writing a list, and here I am some 700 word later still prattling on ( noisy brain/ADD/middle aged rambling).

1. Pollyanna Reads the Guinness Book of Records (holding your breath)

2. Pollyanna Challenges the Record for Largest Rubber-Band Ball

3. Pollyanna memorizes the Farmers Almanac

4. Senior Day 1981

5. What Breaks the Human Heart (Poems 7-9)

6. Why Snow White Insisted on a Pre-Nup Agreement

7. Cinderella E-Harmony Profile

8. Prince Charmings E-Harmony Profile

9. Resume

10. From the Secret Life of Bureaucrats