Last notes on the cull

What is it like to tell a defensive crow that he has no natural enemies? Sort of embarrassing. 

A poem-per-day challenge based on my earliest forays into what-was-not-even-really-poetry seemed like a festive way to participate in National Poetry Month. However the project was far tougher than I’d expected, when half-realized during a late-March jog. I knew my source material had limitations and I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to interrogate it. But I didn’t consider just how insufferable working with one’s own past is, let alone abiding the habit of facing its artefacts every morning before work. And I certainly didn’t think about the anxiety of self-publishing poetry each day, whether it was, in my eyes, finished or not. (Being a “basher”, as defined by Kurt Vonnegut, didn’t appease this process.) There are more pertinent writing tasks I could've been working on.

But now that April’s through, I’m satisfied with The sulk crow cull. Not proud, but satisfied. For better or worse, I owe a lot to the discipline of my teenaged self. And even though I’m not very patient with him over the course of this erasure series, I’m happy to mangle and immortalize his compulsion to ape whatever it is we call poetry.