Reimagining Dragons

I’ve been writing poetry since I was ten or twelve. That’s nearly twenty years of writing poetry. I like to think time has sharpened my words, chiseled rough stone into smooth sculptures. I’ve progressed so far in my craft that I actually felt I had some good ones to submit to journals recently. They were all rejected, but the fact that I haven’t really submitted poems to any place since I was like 16 or 17 sending in awful poetry to prestigious literary journals and contests has got to mean something, right?

It’s also been a very long time since I’ve posted on Silent Soliloquy. I could name a dozen excuses, but one reason I’d like to highlight is the strange juxtaposition of writing as hobby and hoping to be published someday. This creates tension: If I post my best work here, then it’s automatically excluded from nearly everything that could result in getting published. So if I save my best work for submissions and post the rest here, then I’m sharing only dribble. That’s not what I want for my readers or for myself.

In the past, this site has almost been run like my own e-zine, periodically delivering short stories, series, and poems for readers to peruse without subscription fees.

Now, though, I feel I need to take this site in a different direction.

Consider the name: Silent Soliloquy. A soliloquy is an “act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers,” and the description of it being silent adds in just a hint of contradiction (you can’t silently say anything) and a touch of wordplay (since I’m writing, not speaking aloud, it is actually silent).

Just having a blog to be a depositing place of old writing may not be objectively bad, but that’s no longer what I need. I want to grow my craft. I want a place where people (maybe future fans of books I’ll get published) can come to see that I wasn’t always as great a writer and possibly learn about the craft through my journey as an author.

So here’s the new direction I’m considering: I’m going to begin taking snippets of poetry or short stories I’ve written and either analyze it in order to do a rewrite, or I’ll ask some targeted questions with the hope that readers can provide feedback.

I think a realistic schedule for this is maybe twice a month. That’s a slow drip of content, but if it’s more meaningful content, then it’ll still quench our combined thirst.

To start us off, I’ve dredged up literally the earliest dated poem I ever wrote: Dragons.

Vignettes in Leather and Metaphor

Confluence

There is beauty in baselessness. It’s undefined, an exponential without foundation, and in the absence of definition, there is only creation. What does it mean to explore the meaningless, to make meaning from the mundane? Constructs of community and curiosity buttress the armrests of emperors. What becomes of their destruction?

Some say they wish to see the world burn; some wish to light a blaze beneath them.

Others taste the flames in search of ashes, dig through the depths to hedge the phoenix and its feathers, leave the embers in disarray as they build up the burned behemoths of history. Like Prometheus, they feel the sting of silent suffering and the teeth of consequence. They bleed not for bloodshed, but for birth.

Savage Inequity

For AV.

Watch the faint haze of morning fog at daybreak
acquiesce to the self-same silence
of sewage dripping from the drain, such superfluous sound
as Mama Earth caterwauls from her grave
unheard. Let no curmudgeon juxtapose
a ripe red rose with the rosy cheeks
of a child in heat, or the metaphor of lovemaking
with fever. Let no mayor gentrify
the streets of East St. Louis, or D.C., or Raleigh
because history is no palindrome and the wealth they build tomorrow
will not serve the starving today. Let no man testify
how indubitably he must shut down the schools
to stop the drug sales in the schoolyard
or checking birth certificate at bathroom stalls
until he has breathed the perfume of perfunctory pollution
and placed leaded water upon his parched tongue
marches to the end of the bus line begging
while his pleas meet the only answer he has ever given
when the poor and the weak stumble at his knees.

Said the Rain

Said the rain outside my window
as it tumbled to the ground
won’t you lend me a hand
can’t you hold me up?
I’m falling like Niagara
past these cusps of clouds
sifting through the sky
like birds or butterflies
If you could take my hand
would you hold it?
where would you lead me?
or would you let go
let the damp spots dry
and lay in the sun
instead of playing
in the rain
like children

Mishaps or Miracles

The other day he told me, “Darren,
I need your help, and forgiveness.”
So I rose from our bed nervous
for a moment I stopped breathing
as I slid between the rooms
of his apartment, to where he stood
inside the bathroom.