What’s going on penguin peeps? I sure hope you have functioning air conditioning, fans, or at the least a dog with an extremely fluffy tail you can get excited so as to stimulate some poor facsimile of a breeze. Absent all of the above, I’m sorry, that blows. Or not, rather.

A quick public service announcement for my fellow writing friends regarding post tagging. Often when reading the work of others I see only one or even no tags have been applied. Without going off on a blurry tangent re: SEO, I just wanted to say, that up to approximately 10 tags, you are helping your writing reach a wider audience. If you only, for example, use “anxiety” as a tag, not as many people search for anxiety on either WordPress or say, Google- as opposed to using “writing”, “poetry” AND “anxiety”. Even with just those 2 additions you have dramatically increased the likelihood of a new reader stumbling across your efforts. For instance, when I seek out new authors on WordPress I typically search either “poetry” or “writing”. Very generic umbrella terms that allow me to explore a vast selection of new topics. Do not use more than ten (law of diminishing marginal returns:)) it confuses the system and fails to show up at all.

Thank you non-writers for bearing with us through that unplanned delay. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming…

Very, very quick poem today. Really more like a mantra. I accidentally created it recently, almost the entire thing catalyzed in my mind essentially on its own. A few alterations were required but the overall gist remains unchanged.

17 Words, June 17, 2018. [Is it too late to pretend I wrote it last year, 2017?]

I’m not always able

To control my thoughts

But nor do I allow them

Dominion over me.

I kind of like it. Very similar in stylistic structure to a meditation I read in a fantasy novel as a youth. I never forgot it.

Ocean and star

Each am I

Broken my wings

And yet I fly.

-David Gemmell

Not that I really thought about the “original” as I wrote my own. The build felt so right though and that, it turns out, is why. Like when you slide the last piece into a puzzle and it makes an audible click as it settles into place.

I’m off now to puzzle the complexities of the Universe. Or take a nap. Probably one of those two though.

Go with Dog.

-Alex Blaikie

Categories: poetry writing

Tagged as: author brief featured funny new original poet poetry writer writing

dreadpoetssobriety

A broken mind held together by cellophane and some tack.