My Moleskine #1:

If I were to be able to bring myself to write things in my pocket-sized Moleskine, those written things would be of the following nature:

1] While sitting in a coffee-shop and while suddenly observing an incredibly hot guy on the street, I would quickly jot down a description of him so he would be seared in my lust forever. Of course, it would be easier to whip out my camera and take a picture of him. But that would be too easy. And just because he’s an incredibly hot guy on the street, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he, or it, is a Kodak Moment.

2] I would write poetry which, for those of you who know me, is an odd thing for me to decide to do on account of the fact that in general, I hate poetry. Yes; I do remember what my Mother used to say to me: ‘You should never hate things. You can really not like them immensely but you should never hate things. Hate is too strong.’ Okay fine. I really do not like anything written by Stephen King with an immensity that would boggle the mind. But I do hate poetry. I hate reading it (the road not taken, my ass) and I hate writing it.

An aside: I once took an edition of Eliot’s’ Four Quartets and a highlighter pen. I believe yellow. I then proceeded to highlight each and every first-word of every single line of every single poem. Then I typed them out in sentences and in paragraphs, a process which proceeded to create two most interesting results:

One: I had created the most beautiful and complexly layered prose poem – I enjoyed that; Eliot was not a great fan of the genre – certainly one most worthy of the time period (mid-90s), and a hell of a lot better than Eliot’s original Waste Land before Pound had a chance to knife it apart. Boy, that Fascist had his work cut-out for him. But I suppose all Fascists do, don’t they.

Two: I completely crashed and burned the grammar-check utility in Word. It was messy and as a result, to that very day, whenever I Word, I turn that particular utility off.

So why would I write poetry if I wrote in my Moleskine? Because sometimes one simply feels like writing poetry. Writing poetry for me is either too easy or too hard. I’ll create something small and sublime, leaving me to believe that that was all too easy and my time would be better spent struggling over a story or a novel. Than at other times, I will waste countless minutes brooding over that perfect metaphor in order to describe the body of an incredibly hot guy on the street all within the luxurious confines of iambic pentameter and I’ll stop, scratch it out, and start pouring out prose with the greatest of ease.

Yet, the Moleskine is very small, making it highly appropriate for pieces such as poetry. And with my daily work schedule, I sometimes only have the time to write down one or two words, thus, poetry.

Perhaps this will be the very first poem which I will write in my Moleskine:

Moon

That’s it. Just one word. But if you think about it, so complex, deep. Or some-what rudely obscene, depending on how you choose to look at it.