I Have A Writing Problem
I haven’t really written much of anything since 2013.
I am embarrassed to say that I haven’t really done much in the way of creative writing in 13 years. I used to write all the time. Mostly in spare moments, mostly odd, tortured lines of poetry that I would revise and revise again. I wrote some short stories that I never felt I got quite right. I had prepared a collection of poetry that I thought could be published, explored it a little but ultimately let it fizzle.
It’s almost more embarrassing to write about how I let things go, gave up the pursuit of writing and publishing to do what? Nothing creative. Sure life was busy, I had other concerns, family and work and so forth. I could have still written as I always had, in those spare moments. Something could have been made of that time. A slow drip will fill a glass eventually.
My peak moment of writing poetry came in 2012, when I had a few finished poems that I thought were pretty good, and I thought I would submit them for publishing somewhere. I looked around the internet and though I don’t recall if I had tried submitting to many places, I at least got a bite from one. Ditch Poetry published 4 poems of mine on their site in 2012. They no longer appear there, which is fine, but they can be found with some time. I don’t hold any illusions that they would be interested in maintaining space for a would be poet who has only published once in 14 years.
Ditch was about experimental poetry (I say ‘was’ because the site’s date stamp reads 2007). At the time, I was experimenting with words, seeing what I could do with the bare minimum, and torturing meaning a little as I went, I guess their editors saw something in it.
So, to resurrect the poems I wrote, maybe breathe some life back into my writing practice, and with some odd trepidation I can’t explain, I’ll post a couple of the poems that Ditch accepted:
Import
White birds
black on
light lake
background,
geese formation
flying
define horizon
line, matching
mirror movements
on
heat-still water.
Gulls flash
feeding,
dive bombing
pizza-prey,
city’s crust
made sustenance.
The next one I think is appropriate for the content of this post. It is sparse, a little contrived, awkward, but it evokes in me a feeling of impotence and frustration.
Do
Frenetic uselessness a fixation, fixed in brokenness -stuck broken mess- a fiction, false usefulness a dereliction.
A motionless ambition. Emotion, less fruition.
I can’t help feel like I’ve been living Do for the last 14 years since these were published. Since then, that creativity dwindled. My life was busy, and I’m sure I was creative in other ways. My kids have grown up, I’ve changed careers, and enjoy some success. However in the late part of 2025, I burned out. After that I reflected on what I needed to do to avoid burning out again. What I came up with is create more, or I suppose, just create.
It is now mid-year 2026. The inertia has been intense, and the lure of mindless internet consumption is a dastardly siren song that lures me into a state of not-doing-anything. Well, as I said in an earlier post. This blog is meant to be an act of creation that will break me into more creativity, week after week.
This was a difficult post to write. I put it off and almost wrote something else, until I realized that I had already that something else.
Onward.