I am now officially a Published Poet (tm)

Bow down before me, mortals!

(And, Greetings, California Bear Flag League members!)

(And welcome, readers of Annika's Journal! Kick up your feet and relax a bit. My brother and I are turning into letter-writing geezers as we approach our dotage, so have a laugh or two at our expense. We're also getting senile, so we won't know what the heck you're snorkling about.)

Moorpark College's Moorpark Review has seen fit to print my sonnet So we are all of us abandoned Lears in their 2005 issue.

It's a weird little poem, since these days I'm not entirely sure I agree with it. I used it to finish off a paper I wrote about King Lear in 2001. Of course, the fact that I might not agree with it anymore doesn't mean I like it any less - I'm a poet, after all, and that means EGO (ErGO, I like my stuff). The professor, God bless his old-school soul, didn't mark me down for it even though he could have (ah - the freedom of lower division essays!).

Basically, I am pretty dang happy to see that one of my poems got the nod in the Moorpark Review.

Now the question is, how can I use this to leapfrog to fame and fortune?

And please - wait a day or two before crushing my dreams.

In the meantime, here's the Almost Absolute Finished Version of a poem I assaulted you with a few days ago. Any poem that can't survive violent revision didn't have much hope to begin with, is what I'm learning:

On the Morning of A Day Off, A Little Wind and Rain

An old, missed friend wakes me up, politely
Tapping my window with soft fingers,
Whispering the new stories she has learned.
And I’m all ears, warm under my blanket,
Sitting up with my back against the cool wall,
Listening, trying to find a rhythm
In her words, perpetually relieved
To never discern any noticeable pattern.
It would ruin the instance if I did;
Like hearing a drumbeat put to an aria.

There’s no sorrow, no worsted gray buttoned up
Over the colorful promise of her mysteries.
Beneath my closed eyes, her words become
An intimate canvas primed and waiting for
Some improvised brush of . . .
Life, she taps on my window. Laughter. Love.
Each flurry of words brings me
Closer to new than I have been in years.

My window’s open; she enters on the breeze.
Such a scent she brings, clean and real,
The scent wild things know after the snows melt,
And with her comes the lush green certainty
Of something taking root in me,
Like a seed pushed into readied earth by
Some wise old farmer in the North Forty,
And I imagine that when my friend and I
Meet again in the spring, in a rambling conversation
About wild sprouts and raucous blooms,
I’ll be glad then that I don’t now close my window
Just to avoid her random, friendly kisses.

It doesn’t rain enough in Southern California.

Cameron Wood '06