13 Comments

There is a wise and tranquil feel to this. Reminds me of Bokowski. 💜

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Oh goodness! Thank you. High praise! Oddly, I just bought a collection of Bukowski's selected poems. My familiarity with his wider work is a bit thin, so I'm trying to educate myself. It's a whole new world.

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You'll love Bokowski. Did you know Leonard Cohen wrote poems before his songs? One of his:

Thousands

Out of the thousands

who are known or want to be known as poets,

maybe one or two

are genuine

and the rest are fakes,

hanging around the sacred precincts

trying to look like the real thing.

Needless to say,

I am one of the fakes,

and this is my story.

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And it's no surprise Cohen was a poet before her was a song writer, either. Thank you!

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Yep. That's rarefied air right there. And I didn't mean for that to rhyme. It's true, though. And truth's the ticket. I'm taking my small steps. See where it gets me. But I'd be perfectly happy to be a Bukowski pretender.

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This is beautiful! Obviously I'm not a man (ha) but I felt this deep in my soul. There is so much longing and poignancy in every word 🤍

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Melina, thank you so much. I'm touched you took the time to read it. And I'm glad to learn it had a resonance with you even though, as you say, it comes from a male perspective. Being new to poetry, I'm interested to find out whether exploring very personal ideas and thoughts and emotions in poetic form will be cathartic. Before this, I generally wrote escapist fiction, largely to escape myself.

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Your poetry is absolutely beautiful - you’re a natural. Keep going! 🤍

I love the shift from fiction to poetry - to me it signifies a shift towards yourself instead of away from yourself. Escapism is beautiful and needed too, there’s nothing wrong with it when we need it, but I feel that your poetry is bringing you closer to yourself, and that’s needed too.

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Thank you! That's quite the compliment, Melina. And yes, going through a bit of a difficult time as I am at the moment, processing my emotions in this way might be very helpful. And that's very astute about poetry bringing me closer to myself. I might have to steal that!

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I do intuitive work with mostly creatives moving through grief so I can read energy pretty well 🙃 absolutely steal it!

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My God, man, this made me feel emotional! The pacing, the build up to that poignant ending. This is truly some fantastic writing. 👏

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Wow, Justin, thanks, man. That's really kind of you. It truly means a lot. It's so difficult to know if anything you do connects. So I'm really glad you got something from it. And it gives me impetus. I'm still trying to find my way around here, so hopefully, in time, I'll get the hang of the platform a bit better and get an idea of how to better interact. Thanks again.

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We're in this together! I'm glad to connect and support fellow creators here. Especially who have something to offer like you do. 🙌

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