On my page you’ll find Make It Yours + 4, a pdf selling for one dollar and containing five poems. The collection is essentially an anthem to delight, a countermeasure to dread, a doom blocker and a gloom stopper.
Make It Yours +4 also carries an “for mature readers” warning. The warning is for language, but it might be for the message conveyed by the poems as well.
The title poem, “Make It Yours,” is about taking ownership of your own situation and recognizing the goodness and joy, even if only glimmers that most of us can ascertain. But it takes maturity to see through the despair and not give in to naysayers, both internal and external, what we conjure up in ourselves and what rubs off from others. My colleague Timothy Brady, exploring what he labels the “Snippet Zone” called out naysayers in a recent post. Naysaying has become a doctoral program in too many schools, formal and informal.
Another poem in this quintet, “Stop Calling These Dark Times,” is, as the title suggests, further encouragement to leave behind the mindset of extraneous fear and loathing. There are plenty of genuinely serious matters we confront on a daily basis. Creating additional problems misdirects our mental energy to immature locations and squanders valuable opportunities for lighter, brighter thinking.
The other three poems are confectionary, celebrations of a lighter, more buoyant step through the day. “The Captain of All Interactivity” is a satire of grandiose enthrallment with social media, “All Bit Up No More” takes a playful poke at humans and nature and human nature mediated by insect repellents (among other things), and the “Artist Statement” is a spoof on, well, artist statements.
I hope you enjoy Make It Yours + 4 and please watch for future collections.