Window Shopping

Last week I completed an essay entitled, "Travels With My Mistress".  It's a great piece--one of the better first-person narratives I've written in the past year--and I'm confident a literary journal will pick it up for publication this fall when I begin submitting my enormous pile of summer-ripened material in September.

I won't disclose the theme of this piece (not what you think at first blush) . . . but I will say that for many writers the creative process continues day and night: with notes, ideas and whole pieces being structured in the labyrinth of the mind.

For me, I often encounter this process in the car . . . and in any given week, often compose entire poems in my head as I drive.  (This is why I often run over squirrels or crash into telephone poles. I don't text and drive, but I do write while I drive.)  The first chance I get to enounter a piece of paper or a computer screen, I write these down.

Here's a poem I composed some weeks back after glancing out the window of my pathetic old truck (which is, by the way, literally held together with duct tape).  The poem should be self evident.  I won't explain.

Bus Stop

She carries her life in a shopping bag
Overflowing with serious stuff:
A change of clothes, an oily rag,
And hope that hope will be enough.

He sits beside her on the bench,
A forearm covered in tattoo,
His future stolen inch-by-inch
By love and love's trust bid adieux.