OK, I will stop saying what poetry "should be". At least for the moment.

Language is powerful. I throw rhetorical counter-weights against the facile, the clever, the affable blather. Let poetry be hard-won. Or totally unwilled. One or the other. Not this willed verbosity of the glib (my own included).

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Yesterday, from somewhere in seedy old brain, had one of those faint involuntary memories. Vagueness of 8 yrs old, outside, somewhere near lake. Smell of pond, docks, marsh muck... childhood sensorium. Feeling of uncertain alertness, of being in strange or new place. Vividness of childhood reality. Of being child-size in dislocated landscape - someone else's property or agenda... in-betweenness, in transit, not in control...

as if I had been dreaming now of the sort of dreamy sense of reality a child has... mingling two dream-states.

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I'm a typical Minnesotan : happy-go-lunky.