NaPoWriMo, forgive me. I love you deeply, madly, but I wish you were yesterday. I dream of sci-fi novels while you twist your literary lines around my fingers, jealous and cold. Your spare imagery no longer makes me shiver with anticipation. Instead, I have been sneaking sentences of prose: outlines, plots, characters trapped on alien planets. I know you suspect. I’ve been making excuses: oh, just another minute on Twitter. Five more on Facebook. Its just—your reckless alliteration has grown wearisome. Your line-breaks are sharp as thorns.

One spring, when I was young, for a whole month I snuck a teaspoonful of sugar after school while my mom was at work. The first two or three days: oh, such sweetness! My fifth grade fingers tingled with anticipation each time I snuck into the kitchen, certain I would be caught but so desperate for that sugary goodness I couldn’t stop. I loved biting at the stuff. Once I even put some in water and drank it like candy, but strangely, by day fourteen, the granules stuck in my throat. I tried sprinkling it on toast. On grapefruit. It just wasn’t the same. NaPoWriMo, you are sugar stuck in my mouth, bittersweet. Addictive. Can I handle sixteen more days of you?

I want to break your heart.

As most of you know by know, I’ve returned to Poets.org’s discussion forums as Site Admin after a long hiatus. I’m very excited to be back and pleased to report that the NaPoWriMo section is hopping with fresh poems and new members.

For your poetic pleasure, we also have Oliver de la Paz as the Guest Poet this month. You can ask him questions! He’s a really nice guy! Seriously, head on over and see for yourself. There are some poems of his there (including my favorite “Wolf Boy”) and he’s written a few words about poetics as well as some advice for beginners.

——> Oliver de la Paz – Guest Poet for April 2011

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A month ago I said I wasn’t going to do this again. I’m supposed to be writing a new novel and creating the next issue of Autumn Sky Poetry and revising two other novels so I can send them out and make piles of money (ok, just kidding about the $, unfortunately) and. . . well. You get the idea. But then I hit on this great idea: why don’t I write poems that are completely self-indulgent? I mean, for years now I’ve been writing to figure something out (meter, sonnets, alliteration, etc.), or to prove a point (prose poems? hell yeah!), or to learn the discipline of writing every day. I did it. I learned a lot. But I’d never really written just because. What would happen if I did that? Hmm. You’re not supposed to be self-indulgent when you write, everyone says. I can hear a little voice chiding me for it even now — uh excuse me for a moment. . .

[Shut UP stupid little voice, I spit on you! Ptew! *sounds of a scuffle* Take that!]

So! starting tomorrow I will attempt to write a collection of poems tentatively titled: Ballroom – a memoir. It’s about dance (in case that wasn’t obvious). I began taking ballroom dance lessons about two and a half years ago, and I love it in a way I never expected. It’s not like I didn’t already have an art that I loved, so I didn’t really approach dance as anything other than a fun hobby, and then it reared up and bit me on the a**.

Anyway. We’ll see what happens, yes?

I’ll be posting at Poets.org’s Discussion Forums. Click here to see the poems, one per day all month long.
Egad.