Weekend Goal

My goal for this weekend is to finish my next book, which I believe is going to be called Sentience, unless I can come up with a better title. That is the title of what’s probably the longest poem in the book, definitely the one I’m most proud of, even though it only got a tepid response when I posted it online and read it out loud at one of our recent poetry readings. I like it, and that’s what counts.
It’s an important concept, the idea of the poem being that sentience is actually a new development in the universe, and it stands the whole paradigm of physical laws and cause and effect and forest fires and floods as a natural and necessary part of the cycle on it’s head. We no longer have to accept the universe the way it is, we can create the universe we want.
We’ve been making sort of a half-assed, ill-educated attempt to do that for the past 65,000 years or so, but we’re getting better at it and may, if we’re smart, pull it off before we totally destroy the planet and commit mass suicide as a species, which also seems a likely possibility, but I’m against that.
I’ve got enough poems now that I can actually toss some of the rubbish ones aside so I think this book is going to be a good one. This weekend I must do three things. The first is to arrange the order, which I don’t waste a lot of time or mental energy on. I put my title poem first, try to come up with something snappy for the last page, and try to sort the ones in the middle so there aren’t too many long ones in a row or, which is more difficult, too many short ones in a row. The 2nd thing is the table of contents and the 3rd thing is the introduction. Easy peasy.