Paper Progress and Archiving Oldies

Proving myself to graduate schools may be the death of me.

I set aside today for the latter half of my introduction to this paper.  My to do list said this:

Establish idea of community, establish idea of classroom community in my classroom, identify which characteristics are transcendent, then establish the two communities I will be analyzing.

I basically spent all day thinking of community.  To define community is...not possible.  What is community?

I am not well versed in scholars of sociology or anthropology so spent my day looking for those people.

I then lost my focus and my brain shut down.  

Man.

Tomorrow I get back to it.  When I know I need someone to support my idea in this intro part, which won't be research heavy, I am just going to enter brackets.  Maybe that will keep me focused.

Speaking of not being focused on one topic...

Someone once told me that I was not a writer.  This someone also determined that I was inadequate in other aspects of my life, according to this person, which means very little to my sense of self or worth in my life.  The thought that I, someone who writes for various purposes every day, discusses writing every day, teaching writing every day, and reads books (that were written) every day, is not a writer has recently caused me to ponder what qualifies one as a writer.  I think I am a writer, whether I publish in paper back journals or win awards for what I compose.  What is a writer?  What is community?  Unanswerable questions may be the death of me actually.

So many questions.

I have written more with my students...they are writers, right?

"The 'Art' of Forgetting"

Dedicated to a man and woman who wore their heads on their necks upside down and backwards and to the things that they wished out of their lives and the things they maybe wanted back one day.

If only my mailbox could muster the courage to form the words you must’ve meant.

As if a little glitter is enough to patch up a hole in the wall that begs the bitter wind enter safely.
Or a check hidden in a fold could buy back skinned knees, honor roll certificates, pre-fem playground games, post-pubescent heart troubles, the first rally, the first and second graduations.
All things spectacular, mediocre - a fall from Grace,
a journey to enlightenment - have rushed past without your knowing.

Hallmark certainly doesn’t erase snotty noses, smoking barrels, swallowed fearlumps, or sheets hiding tiny, tear-stained faces from a troubled memory.

The days of sugar and spice and everything nice are long gone and the evenings completed by mothball scented animal crackers have been tucked into the pockets of forgetting.
The only thing worse than a Driftwood Dad is the older generation of bandits that acted as his accomplices.

And if you knew me at all you would know that I hate pink and don’t believe in angels.

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Thinking more on writing and writers I thought that maybe what makes a writer a writer, aside form skill and public acceptance, is one's courage or ability to share what s/he writes.  I have books of secrets, archives of baby thoughts dating back to 1996, but never had courage to publish or share.  I was published when I was in kindergarten though.  That is a fact.  A story I wrote in elementary school was published in a journal and I was in the newspaper along with a friend of mine for this achievement.  Does this qualify me and my abilities?  Great!

Here is this piece, and here's to sticking it to those who think they have all the answers, but are truly grasping for straws.

"Tiresius Bound"

Knee deep in the entrails of then – of nevermore
The son of the Shepard seeks truths in the sewage of yesterday’s massacre.
Veils of ignorance, of falsehood, slurp in excrement scraping along behind the staff that clanks the rusted and forgotten pipes.
Seeking ablution for becoming lost in this wasteland.
Following only the sounds of filth flowing into an
unknown abyss the blind prophet seeks his grail of contentment.