So whilst I was in St. Charles this weekend, I stayed at the Tru by Hilton again, mainly because of its proximity to the historic Main Street and because I can get Hilton points for staying there. Not that I pay attention to the accumulation of Hilton Points nor do I expect to use them, but I have been conditioned to accumulate points as ends in themselves.
Instead of going for a run or hitting the little fitness center room, I spent an hour or so pounding coffee in the hotel’s common area, scratching lines on my notorious legal pad. Later that evening, I was in the coffee shop listening to Janet Evra, and I scratched a couple of lines and added a little code, and I finished the poem.
Which was a great relief, as I have been working and scratching at this poem a long, long time.
How long?
A tidied version of a draft is on the cover of Coffee House Memories.
Once can find behind the lined notepad pages behind the initial lines notes taken during a meeting at the Republic Pregnancy Resource Center Happy Feet 5K committee in 2017. So, yeah, it has likely been percolating for many years.
But I am happy to have finished it. It might be only the third poem I’ve written in the last ten years (only “Springfield Panera Bread BDU” and “Canny” come to mind).
When I showed it to my beautiful wife, she said it was good. She did not roll her eyes when she said it like she did when reading my cousin’s poetry, but I’ll take what I can get these days.
In my more fatalistic moments, which are more like fatalistic minutes or hours or days rather than moments, I think this might be the last poem I ever write given the pacing over the last twenty years. In the interims between my fatalism, though, I think I should make some time to sit in coffee shops with a pad and a pen since I rather enjoyed it, especially as I actively developed this poem.
Oh, and as far as the poem itself goes, I’m not going to share it on the blog at this time. I’m going to tighten a couple turns of phrase and submit it to poetry journals for a bit and see if I can get it, you know, published. Should that route fail, gentle reader, I’ll share it here so someone other than me, my wife, and a set of editorial assistants can read it.
