to go or not to go

i'm struggling today with a decision i do not have power to make. i think sometimes my friends think i have no (or very few) submission issues with my beloved. i have many.

this weekend is a poetry intensive with the matriarch. i've been invited. i've been told there is no cut off for me and if i can make it, i will be welcome.

i would give my i teeth to go, or as i told my dear poet friends, i'd cut off my right arm to go (though that would hamper my writing a bit, which may relieve some).

you see, i've been the odd bird, the lone poet for so long. to be surrounded by poets for even a weekend, creating beside them, on a level playing field. we all get the same prompts. the same fifteen minutes to write a poem. we all eat together at the same table.

there is nothing like it.

if i go, i miss a play my daughter has two parts in. my best friend asked me what i thought about that, i said,

i'm willing to look like a bad mom for this. that is how important it is to me.

though we've spent a good bit of cash on my poetry endeavors here in the empire state, i am asking for a bit more to get me to this intensive.

my husband is no scrooge. he is no penny pincher. he has been and will always be a gracious giving soul. my issue is not with him, necessarily. rather, with the desire in me to be about what i was created to do. with those of similiar ilk.

i can't tell you how bored i get of marketing talk. of crafting the perfect novel. of writing memoirs that sell. fine. i get it. but i don't want any part of it. i want to write poems. i want to be around those who write poems.

my entire life, i've met in person, very few poets who are actually doing what i do. in dallas there were probably thirteen poets i knew. i saw them once a month perhaps if i was lucky, and not all at the same time. i did not have an ongoing relationship with any of them. we were merely cordial.

here, while the numbers are somewhere in the fifties at least of those poets i've met, there are still very few i'm in actual contact with on a regular basis. that must change. how does that change? by being around them. by getting to know them.

i'm the peculiar type that needs hours of time, entire blocks of time to get to know people. i don't just let the first person who bumbles into my presence befriend me. i wait. i wait for the right soul. the right stranger. the right poet.

this takes time.

soon, we will leave new york and i will have only the relationships i forged and who knows if they will withstand the test of distance. when i am not able to lend a shawl to the cold or run an errand for a tired poet in need.

my husband looks at the dollars and cents of it. i can't blame him. he knows the numbers, i don't.

i look only at the poets. the poems i won't write. the intimacies i won't experience. such great losses for me.

but i will grieve it and get on with my life.

if i cannot go, i cannot go. no sense crying over it. i will try to be mature about it. but what does that really mean? not feeling? not grieving? not longing to be there?

no, i'll do all those things. i'll get angry, i'm sure. but i'll submit to whatever the decision will be. he tells me i wasn't told no enough growing up. i guess now is his chance to deal me a few nos. and i'll try to accept them with grace. and be at peace with them.