In an attempt to back-up all my Word files before my computer dies--a death that's slowly taking place beneath my fingertips--I started reading some old manuscripts I had started with poems I had forgotten about.I look back at how I used to write and it was much more playful. I wrote poems about Ritz crackers and Jack Kerouac on Mt. Rushmore and really, I didn't seem to care what the subject was, I was only writing to fool around a bit.
Of course there are poems in these files that are quite unfinished (even though I thought they were done) and poems I reread trying to figure out what I was talking about. But I'm finding that there's a good number of them I still like and it seems they just got placed in the Goodwill box when I made room for new works. (The lamp wasn't broken, it just didn't fit in the living room anymore.) And so goes the life of my poems, placed in a box.
I have take 2 or 3 of these poems and added them to my current manuscript (a deed I'm not sure I will be happy about 2 months from now), but for a few days, I'm going to let them hang out with the new stuff, see if they can blend in with the new stuff, the stuff that in a few years I'll have placed in another box to make room for the next batch of new poems, the beauties I will want to share with the world--how we love our new babies the most.
