Readers,
I know. I said I was not going to do this anymore. Or only rarely. “I’ll be quiet as falling snow,” I said.
Live, Laugh, Lie, I guess. Your potentially scoffing judgement is accepted.
I imagine Whitman would reply, “Do I contradict myself? Tough shit, I contain multitudes.”
What? I like my Walt profane.
One of the reasons I’m writing so soon again on Substack is because I neglected to give gratitude to some of you in my “farewell”. So I’m going to remedy that, and talk about my writer’s journey/dilemma since my so-called goodbye.
In short: if I’m going to seriously query publishers with book proposals or manuscripts, I need two things: an agent, and more currently important, [DUN DUN DUH] a maintained social media platform. Gah.
So, Hotel (Substack) California it is. For now. It’s fun to think of it as a choice.
More words on that later.
The following poem is from my debut collection, published in 2019. It has been edited from the published version. I wrote (in part) why I’m editing/republishing the poems here:
Contradictorily yours,
—C
The Martin We Can’t See
Murdered before my days Took bullets for words for thoughts few dared to say during an American age stirring again today Appreciating his history a convenience, watered down for my white eyes to see Bites and nibbles swallowed easily Hijacked politically, commercially Not till recently did I understand that eventually he was hated universally How he and Baldwin committed the greatest heresy They questioned reality They saw that race was just the makeup on a deeper malady’s face and we weren’t the world’s deliverance that jingoism had become the mechanism of our grace King challenged the edifice where we stored all our confidence that justified our dominance Turned our capitalist pride into troubling shame For this everyone cursed his name He committed the greatest sin— he suggested abandoning the world in which we live
Thank you 💗
I take you oh so seriously my friend. Thank you for a reminder here for I was alive.