Charles Jensen | Writer

What am I doing with all these poems? Poems, poems, poems. Dumb things. Little toys. If you were to place all of my poems end to end you would probably stop caring. They don’t stop coming. I try to turn it off and sometimes they stay away. Then, something happens, like the tiny click you hear when you stand on a live land mine. Your choice: stay there or get blowed up. So, I stay there. I can’t stop this. If there were something more productive I could do with my time I would. As it is, I fill up my days with multiple jobs and guitar playing and dog playing and phone calls and cooking and then, even then, when everything else is going on, a poem uncoils in my ear and I have to write it down. This is where you draw the line between vocation and compulsion. A compulsion is meaningless except to the person who carries it out. All of this means something.

Clearly, I need to get out of the suite today. Don’t worry: I have made plans for a social activity for dinner.