3. Dilapidation

This is all a means of making amends for two years of mild silence. Distractions fall into my lap. Miss-placed files remain hidden. Today's entry for example. It was mapped out and ready to be published days ago, but now, now it has vanished in a clutch of digital papers with obscure titles or unsaved memories.

By accident I discovered slash fanfiction and immersed myself into the alternate universes of individuals remaking, reshaping their favorite characters into something else. There was an initial purpose for the lapse into casual reading— I was seeking out a colloquial tone, an everyday vernacular to use in a new series of poems— language of the everyday; time will tell if the lost time was an actual benefit or a heavy distraction.

There is a cumbersome beauty in scrawled graffiti, the phrases of a curse, painted along the base of a warehouse, or a primitive, awkward chalk outline of a phallus smeared on the sidewalk outside a secret door along the riverfront. Where the status quo do not venture. The streets in disrepair, cracked cobblestones making up the pavements. I am obsessed with dilapidation. With colloquial lines of broken grammar. It is a love/hate situation. Like the overused contraction or the cliched expressions that litter the walking conversations of teenagers in the hallways as they run between classes. An act of rebellion in itself. A personal jazz. Personal lingo for cliques and close associations. A belonging in other words. What I feel is missing from my writing career, a sense of belonging to an established group of writers/readers.