A Common Enemy

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 23

Last night Christian and I went to the Catholic Christmas celebration in a natural wooded Grotto called “The Festival of Lights.”

We got a white candle and lit it together and wished for all the big global things for the New Year, world peace, health and prosperity and good fortune for all, but we wished too that we would each have a better writing year.

I haven’t written a strong poem in months.

In a way I suppose it has to do with not being “in the game” anymore.

This year after my reading at Borders in March I withdrew completely from the local poetry “scene”.

The one thing that the snake pit did seem to do was get me so furious all the time and that fierce frustration and anger fueled my latent competitive nature and I would write to prove my work was better than…

You name it; I would try to prove my work was better than it.

Oh, not to mention the pathetic soap opera nature of a bunch of people, many with mental problems and addictions, pretending that they had something going on, going for them, the group delusion that with enough anger and enough raw unadulterated desire for recognition that one could make talent appear in places it will never go, a kind of calling for Mephistopheles to come to a place too insignificant to bother with or bargain with.

(One of the things we saw in the store full of Catholic “stuff” including fudge made by monks, was a really really bad statuette of Saint Michael smashing the Devil’s head. It is so much more beautifully portrayed here in Guido Reni’s Painting.)

I am not saying that there aren’t individuals in the local poetry scene that aren’t sticky with evil, because of course there are, but in the broad scheme of these things it is a tame backwater, stagnant and getting more foul.

Sometimes, someone young and talented will wade in and get snapped at by the turtles with their ancient wrinkled necks and insatiable libidos and appetites but mostly it is the same old folks caught in the whirlpool, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the muck, down down down the dark ladder.

Anyway, one thing I know is other then for brief and well-armored forays I am not going back. I must find some other form of inspiration.

Falling in love is good-the buzz-but there must be another way. I will ponder this today on my way to yoga class.