What was it about an un-chiseled, non-sculpted slab of marble that sparked the pistons in my mind today? I was reading about Robert Browning in the next-to-current London Review of Books and they mentioned a poem of his called "The Statue and the Bust." My mind went skating toward metaphor and - voila - dense slabs of marble and granite remain fixed across the warehouse of my mind. Each boulder represent something else. Or they are all the same, in a way. There is that well-worn quote from Michaelangelo regarding the imprisoned figure withing the uncarved material. So on and so forth.

Nicotine.

I have not written any lines of verse in over a month. I had a burst of energy and wrote out the outlines and skeleton frames for about five poems before succumbing to laziness and emptiness. Out of those five poems, one or two lines were fine. Maybe even very fine. And that reminds me of what a couple old women said about John Reed's poetry in the movie "Reds"; very fine.