Working Notes

What I find to be most difficult about this blogging is just putting down my thoughts. Much more difficult than putting up a poem or photograph, something that I've already worked out, something that sort of had to come out. This other thing, this just 'talking', seems, well, pointless.

But I'm opening up the channel to see what comes out. Right now my writing is not at all interested in showing itself- for the past several weeks I have written no poems, and the work on my novel is intermittent and hard-won. But the artwork is pouring out of me at what is, for me, an astonishing rate. My experience is that when you can act as a conduit for creative flow you should just get out of the way as much as possible and let it pour through....god knows it is rare enough when it happens. So I'm riding that wave right now and enjoying it.

At work things are just sort of plodding along. I am working on a series of unsolved homicides from the late 70's, which is the best thing I've been involved with as a detective. My partner and I have set up a separate office and it looks like what you'd imagine, if you imagine that it's not like television. We're in an empty room in a storage building. We stole a desk and a table and two chairs, a filing cabinet, a dry erase board. We got a tech guy to hack a line in so we could set up a laptop and access our records system. We covered all the windows with brown paper and put all the crimescene photos up on the walls.

All day I am surrounded by these murdered women. In several of the photographs they look right into the camera, caught forever in their terrible poses, and I am not kidding when I tell you that they want something from me. That's no shit. I see their faces at night, or the bindings, the wounds...and it's not like I wake up screaming or anything. I mean, this is my job. It doesn't frighten me or creep me out. It's just sad. And I carry a certain weight around with me now, a small stone that I can't let go of.