10/5/1 & 24/7

10/5/1:I'm fascinated by the 10/5/1/today meme that's dominating the blogs I follow this week. But I'm a little too private to give you too much of that, I fear. It's difficult being a conservative* exhibitionist at times. But I will dig out a poem I wrote built around something like that theme and post in a day or two. It's called "Reflections on the Ongoing Decay of the World". I know it's going to be painful to read again, coming as it did in that dark period between my acceptance that I was not Wallace Stevens and my recognition that using words I didn't fully understand did not improve my poems much. Wait, that was the same moment, wasn't it...?

24/7: What I want for Christmas this year is TIME. This season (and this period in my life, for a number of reasons I will leak gradually into this space over the next few months / years / decades; see "conservative" above) is packed from morning stirring to evening collapse with stuff. My books to read pile is starting to look like something out of a Dr. Seuss illustration, covers and bookmarks arcing and teetering like the tartoofers in the Grinch's bag. Short list of the books I'm fiending to get into (the ones on top, anyway):

• What He Ought To Know, Edward Foster's latest book, a new and selected poems. He read some of these last Sunday in the Spoken Word series. Also, the latest issue of Talisman, dedicated to Gustaf Sobin.
• The Secret of Me, Meg Kearney's novel in verse from the perspective of an adopted teenage girl
• Conversations During Sleep by Michele Wolf. It's an old (1997) book, but I was reminded how much I like her work by her 2005 appearance in Poetry East, and I've finally gotten around to purchasing it.
• Bradbury Speaks, collected essays by the man himself. I learned by the time I was 11 that SF wasn't my particular thing as a writer, but my prose has never really stopped imitating Bradbury's short stories.

Oh, but that doesn't include books I've taken off the shelf recently to walk through again, which are in a different pile: Blue Stones and Salt Hay, I Am That Hero, and a half-dozen others.

And I should really pickup that pen again at some point.

* - this word is used in this space in its former and non-political usage, meaning "traditional or restrained in style".