The Friday Influence

This morning as I was leaving the cafe I was stopped by one of the waitresses and asked: So, is this like your office or what – I see you come in and get lost for hours over there.  Which is true: I do get lost for hours over there.  Over there with scraps of paper.  With notebooks.  With ink.  I have spent more of my life than not getting lost for hours.  What my girlfriend terms: sinking into words.

Granted, this has led me to be the kind of guy who is no good at comebacks.  I will stew over what someone says, look at it from every angle, think of every possible comeback, and only hours later have the thing I should have said.  Which is a terrible way to be if one wants to interact socially.  As a writer, however, I get to use the phrase a sensitivity to language to explain myself.

It is this sensitivity that has me hours later thinking about what else I could have said to the waitress.  I believe what I did say was something along the lines of: O yeah, uhm, it’s great, sitting, writing, losing…  Which, again, is true: I love to sit, write, lose.

It is the same sensitivity to language that had me earlier this week turn to my co-worker in awe when he said: I hope there is a light rain tonight so that tomorrow when I go riding in the mountains the roads are tacky.  Tacky!  Brilliant!  I scramble and scribble each day hoping for the kind of clarity of thought that people speak in.

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This is to be a blog about poetry.  Soon there will be links to published poems.  I will also post some original stuff every once in a while.  For now, check this out:

http://thingsinlight.blogspot.com/2012/04/nm-poetry-jose-angel-araguz.html

J