The thing about professionals, is that it takes them longer to warm up.  It takes a hell of a long time for them to warm up, to get into the mode, to feel it part of their blood stream.  As an amateur contender, you have to be tough too, but in a different way;  you have to work a job:  and since you have a job, and a perfectionist, or a scientific truth seeker, or dead on tuned in poet.  The job gives you limited hours and limited energy.  I guess it might be the social life that goes, first.


So, I wrote earlier today, about five in the afternoon, it's 11:30 at night, the rice cooker has cooked its bowl, I got a bike ride in on the canal, and even up Chain Bridge Road, a climbing road, up beyond a cemetery to the left, then finally Battery K. Park, then up again further, the road like the Pyrenees, and finally I saw (thunder &) lightning in the distance while the planes came in, as if sliding down an invisible string from far far in the distance, only a headlight, let the mountain bike turn and back down slow enough so the brake, the one front one, workable still, having lost pressure, doesn't squeal,  I'm back safe before the storm comes, and the old Bianchi is on the trainer...

But that is warm up.

The poem of the night:

It goes like this, somewhat.  It is necessary to go through an awful, complete heartbreak.  That's where you know your talents were burned and which ones.  And so, the talents have to go deeper, down, more wild, more inspired...  More musical, more poetic, more stream of consciousness, less rational, more mythic, more gut, less logic... more soulfulness, less control, more heartbreak, less happy, but for those ones you dig out of the dirt, or find, tortured, alone, self-conscious as the next creature in the stream.

An oppressed people can understand a lot, and even clap at gutsy songs.