Poetry, Pathology, and the Phases of the Writing Life

When I get away from my writing projects for a short while, I always start thinking I may be done with them for good.

Then when I do return to them, I find that they are fun and that there's lots to do.

It's easy under the current abusive right-wing regime to get into a hiding mode.

My poetry reveals my autoerotic drag-dancing self -- which the regime would consider pathological -- and as such my poetry sometimes feels shameful to me, and it seems rude and even dangerous to share it.

So, I'm either in a hiding mode, avoiding my writing work, or in a selfie-drag-dancing mode, relishing my writing work.

I think I have finally decided not to publish it on Substack -- it is quite adequately published on my blog, where I don't ask people to subscribe to it.

That really does seem properly discreet.

I myself am my poetry's audience fit, though few -- even though my collections are organized so that the "shameful" poems are mostly confined to Pretty Yokel. Woke Yokel and Trans Yokel are also risky, for obvious reasons.