Spiral Bound Notebooks - Sept 14 2025

 

Spiral Bound Notebooks

Sept 14 2025

Burn my journals when I die.

My secrets, up in smoke,

the curious mercifully spared

my daily tedium. 

Not even to the grave with me,

just gone

   . . . and I won’t regret their loss.

Because I never thought I’d be remembered

never wanted to be.

It would be nice, of course 

to have left an impression;

but then, even the greats are lost to posterity

in a generation or two.

No, I wrote to understand,  

wrote because I had to,

wrote instead of act.

So it was all about the process

not the artifact,

the exercise

of self-expression

in and of itself.

And I never did look back,

just kept on writing

confessing

debating myself,

then topping up the pile.

Presidents have libraries

heroes their biographers

stars romans à clef.

While my life’s not worthy of memoir,

not big enough

for autobiography. 

Just windy scribblings

in dollar store notebooks

in blue ballpoint ink;

nothing I’d imagine 

you’d ever care to read.

I heard Tony Hale (a widely admired character actor particularly known for his roles in VEEP and Arrested Development) in a podcast interview talking about his journaling habit. At one point he said “burn my journals when I die”, and an analogy with my poetry immediately came to mind. 

Because I write almost daily, have produced an immense amount of verbiage (some of it even pretty good!), and these questions are always lurking: why write? …does it mean anything even though it will likely never be read (or hardly read)? …and — most germane here — what will become of it? The answer to the last is “nothing”: it will vanish. Or maybe exist in some insignificant place on the internet so remote it’s effectively inaccessible. I fully accept this. I’m fine with “burn it when I’m dead.” After all, there’s no real difference between burned and inaccessible.

Of course, I also appreciate the difference. Tony Hale’s stuff is private and confessional. Between him and his God. For his eyes only.  Mine is intended to be read. I write with a hypothetical reader in mind, even if she never materializes. (And I have no God or gods.) It would be nice to have readers. But still, it’s ultimately the exercise, not the artifact; the journey, not the destination.  

I’ve realized for a long time that the only poems I really like are the short ones: short and sweet. So I’m consciously trying to keep them that way. Takes discipline. Because get me going, and all these ideas immediately flood in, tangents tantalize. I just have to bear down and try to just keep it to one thing.

Still longish  … but not as.