i had no dreams. i forgot to put some mugwort under my pillow. but then again, it's been a restful reprieve. not that dreaming is a punishment. it's just a no-hands moment. my teacher wants me to be writing longer poems. i don't really like holding so many words at a time. i like when one poem is dealing with one image, or i-mage. have you ever read M. Nourbese Philip? her essay, "She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks," is all about our relationship to the construction of the image. it's worth a google. i need to study it more myself. we need to be better at looking. maybe i can make longer poems about one moment. depends on the scope or breadth of the moment. my firesong is half a state-wide. when i showed it to people, they'd never heard of a firesong. that probably isn't something i made up, just something few people have heard before. rainsongs are a thing, i figure firesong must follow. equal and opposites and all that. when i was showing the firesong on the east coast, some people didn't really know what was happening. i get that people can be insular but its still the same country. sometimes i think the states, once they're united, get too big. we might be doing better if we made a split somewhere in the flyovers, or just split it into the cardinal directions. maybe then we'd play better with others. i was listening to some black comedian who said his granddad used to tell him "if it doesn't start right, how's it gonna end right?" i wonder about this little experiment of ours sometimes.