COMMENTARY ON NEVER WITH ONE

     I wrote this poem in nineteen seventy-two.  It was the very first poem I ever had published.  I had forgotten about it until years later.  When I first turned up in English 101 as a freshmen in college, the teacher asked us to write a short paragraph about ourselves.  This poem popped into my mind as a prose poem.  Someday I would like to find that piece.  It made an impression on my teacher that helped me swim in the direction that I finally swam.  There were a lot of eddies along the way.
     It was not until the early nineteen eighties in poetry school that I learned my lessons in line strength.  I would be curious to know it that prose piece complied with what I learned.
    

Never With One

The dark black sky lay above,
     lit by countless worlds of light.
The soft cool earth beneath,
     with countless worlds of darkness.
A man lay in between,
      one with both though never with one.
Breezes of the night cannot still this troubled
      brain.
Life can solve it perhaps in time
      and death will solve it when the time comes.
And he waits, never with one, always in between.
As time passes men will see
      that this is the way it has to be.
As he waits, never with one, all ways in between.

 Angles of Vision 72 printed in Karachi: AISK; ISI; LAS; KAS, 1972

MISSION STATEMENT

      It is probably time to give the reader of this blog, if there ever are any readers of this blog, some clarification as to what A Total Solid Waste is about.  It is, in the beginning at least, going to be a catalog of all my published work.  I have been writing and publishing under another name for years.  During all this time I have never managed to earn a living through my writing.  I believe I finally broke the one hundred dollar mark in earnings in about nineteen ninety-two with a ten dollar check for a poem.  This huge amount of earned income includes the question I sent to the Question Man column in the San Francisco Chronicle in the late sixties.  The question was Would you be dishonest for ten thousand dollars?.  I made fifty dollars for that one line.  I have not had anything in print since about two thousand and one.  I must just like the writing.
     I will be writing under the new nom de guerre of John Smith, IIMXIII.  With this new pen name I hope to be publishing in the world of the online via a website called Triond.  The old work will be here for anybody to access if they are interested.
     The title of this blog comes from how I have spent the last eighteen years earning a living.  I have been helping to manage the solid waste flow of a small university in the Pacific Northwest.  It really has not been a waste of time; I keep telling myself that.  I have learned about the American education system from the bottom up.  I hope to be finished with The Secret World of Garbage soon.
     With a degree in English from another small university and fourteen years of information services in academic libraries, it is amazing what I have learned from the solid waste flow.  Garbage is just another index of how our society works, an hands on example of how the trickle down theory really functions.