Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, a newsletter dedicated to finding Signal in the Turbulent Twenties.
Author Update: The heavy lifting of rewriting is done. Now I am revising, cutting, tightening, and deepening. There will be more to do if I get it traditionally or self-published, but it’s close to agent query readiness. I’ve been working on an elevator pitch. 28 words, see how this lands:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Hunger Games, and Dante’s Inferno had a whiskey-fueled tryst on a foggy San Francisco night. The Infernal Tower is their misbegotten progeny.
Poem: I threw this up on my website when I built it last year as a sample of my writing. Figured I would send it out this week because I’ve been so busy revising that I didn’t put anything together for the newsletter. I should just let it stand on its own without explaining it, because, well, it shouldn’t need to be explained, if it’s working properly.
Four Second Delay
25JUN15
The craft await rebirth in nylon webs
Plane’s womb filled with sharp-lined mass
The ramp unseals, transforms to gaping maw
— Noisy sky and azure expanse below
Drogue chute deploys, furling in fickle winds
We stand in unison to perform our benediction
A final check of pins and equipage
At the signal, many tons of finely-honed steel
Loosed upon the elements with a vicious heave
Twin leviathans ripped from their stillness
And we sprint for the opening in pursuit
Diving one by one, into an alien world
One Thousand
Face down to the infinite blue
Legs tucked, arms outstretched
Two thousand
Horizon hoves into view
Welcome friend in the maelstrom
Three thousand
Bodies settle to earth bound fall
Gravity asserting dominion at last
Four thousand
Reaching for the ripcord
A supreme act of faith and confidence
Open open open
Good canopy above, such a magnificent sight
Then a chaotic spiral downward
Track your boat — drifting on rivers of air
Find it— follow with singular focus
The ocean looks placid, deceptively so
Until watery impact, sooner than expected
Submerge, slither out of your chute
Sidestroke the rest of the commute
Have a great week everyone!
Thank you. Did not read the poem yet. But I'm prob not going to express any opinions. A poem is on a different level of discourse. Perhaps a much more personal one, words hewed out of whole feelings, reaching out like a sprouting seed, to wrap meaning around lived felt experience. That is better discussed in real time and in a comfortable setting.