It is my sincere attempt to begin a new chapter in the writing career of Middlepoet. I am planning on a return to poetry. Although, I never really left. Somewhere along the way in my writing career, I fear that at times I have forgotten to keep the writing basic, in short to be poetic.

As a writer I have at times gotten away from what poetry should be, simplistic. Prose has made brief appearances in my poems, which although sometimes not a bad thing, can be a bit of a distraction. As a result, I have had to go back to the basics. I have been reading Shel Silverstein to refamiliarize myself with the beauty of the simple thought, the simple story.

I have found a great sense of reward in my attempt to return to metaphors and slant rhymes. Part of my poetic rebirth is my new found love for micro fiction. Essentially many of the “poems” I was writing were in fact works of micro fiction. I thoroughly enjoy the concept of telling a story in just a few hundred words, as is the case with micro fiction in prose and with poetry in verse, but it is important for me artistically to maintain a distance between the two.

Perhaps, this moment in my journey as a writer is an epiphany, perhaps the early stages of a manifesto. Perhaps this is nothing more than a continualization of a writer 3who has figured something out that is not such a mystery in the first place.

Rain drops on the window, smeared vision of winter, dripping down summer screens left attached out of a desire to be lazy. Tapping drops provide rhythm to the afternoon while bodies of woman and dog lay snuggled on the couch.

Breathing underneath blankets woven out of past generations they constitute family. Piled together just a room away on a winter afternoon of lounging, as though this day could never change even with the movement of the sun across the sky making shadows grow long. Water runs past this desk into the ocean a few blocks away, floating to parts unknown. There probably will not be any gnomes traveling as companions with the drip drops underneath umbrellas that are waiting for a slice of the sun.