Hope

I feel hope...and this moment of
hope
feels like a pleasant yet dangerous one, as
the last few times, hope
ended
with me headed straight
for a hard fall out
a high window
Let's hope this time,
hope will play different
as I ride this wave

We Will Be Liøns

Burnt Notions: Dream Poet for Hire

Anniversary Poem

I still think about you, port of call,
you're in my bones
and how has it happened
that I am not on esplanade, every day

Poets

 Poets do not prop up politicians

The Trajectory:

My 20s: Ablaze in This Haze

My 30s: Backbeat

My 40s: Burnt Notions

Burnt Notions: What Are Burnt Notions?

Burnt Notions: the passions that cool and evolve, or harden and disintegrate into ash, the way we stay young, the way we age, the ideals that will not be met and the joy or resolve you find to keep going in your 40s versus your 20s or 30s

Burnt notions: the lies we’ve discarded, the times we just could not find it in ourselves to be there as expected 

Burnt notions: all the ways we can no longer count on anything to function as needed for us in this American society, yet still being expected to pay taxes and debts we cannot afford

Burnt notions: applying for traditional job after job, with tradition defined by restrictive, authoritarian impulses and mislabeled professional as, meanwhile, the freelance market is made even more difficult to navigate by W2s down at City Hall, who are even angrier than those of us who can barely scratch out a living practicing our crafts. Anger is what they enjoy. The rest of us experience burnout because we have not blotted out all other emotions in the face of this fabricated oligarchic stress and manage to maintain our sense of self, even as the strength to open up, to be vulnerable, is misconstrued as weakness.

Burnt notions: being exhausted without complaint, but acceptance of the exhaustion as a condition of living, whether that exhaustion is physical, mental and/or spiritual in nature, with the goal being to avoid not the burnout, but the permanent scarring

Burnt or not, we are a light for ourselves, even on our dimmest settings, because we keep on going, rather than folding the way people who are described as burnt out are always depicted as doing, which ignores the subsequent unfolding, the recovery skipped in the story, the way people are out there fighting stasis in the face of cruelty, battling depression, finding humor in the horror, enduring and then expanding the grim restrictions and formats we are made to navigate just to live by people with only one asset, money, and committing to one another, to our happiness, anyway.

The notions and demands we’ve been beset with may be a fire that has burned or is burning us, but we regenerate, we remain, we grow through the heat as the literal temperature of earth is raised by the same misanthropes routing the job market, the government, the internet, the ones who could never be a light for anybody.

Burnt notions are the focus of this writing.

Rare reader note: I'll continue to post at this blog and will also be posting this and other essays for public view, with other series and deeper content available via Patreon. Thanks for reading.