I'm beginning to wonder if getting repeatedly clocked in the face on a regular basis will eventually hinder my ability to write poetry. I mean, come on, having Muay Thai guys throw punches at your head as part of a Tuesday night routine won't increase your brain cells. However, I'm thinking it over while sitting with my fly rod on a moss covered rock, beside a small Pennsylvania freestone mountain brook guarded from trespassers on all sides by a mat of purple briars. I managed to sneak past them on the deer highway and they don't seem to mind. But what is poetry? It's the words between the rapids of a babbling brook, the shooting star that gives us an excuse to wish, the moment a brook trout eats an insect off the surface and for a split second, is half exposed in all it's halo-ed glory to the warm and dry beyond of the sun. It's a collision of pure chance, when God smiles down and gives you a little reward for firing enough synapses, of fishing through a riffle enough times, where a trout or a poem leaps out of thin air, as if to say, "Hey there! You earned this!" I might need to make a few extra drifts into my internal cosmoses later in life, but dammit I've always been a bit of a gambler.
