penwithlit

I just finished logging my currently inked pens on the wonderful fountain pen companion and I was a bit shocked to discover that I have 30 fountain pens inked up (each one with a different ink). This is of course the result of the Inkvent madness and my insistence on actually filling pens with the samples in the calendar instead of just using a dip pen.

I’ve written Solar Storm (day 4) dry and I’ve dumped Spruce (day 3) because of the smell, but I’ve kept Pick Me Up (day 15) despite the smell, because of the rich chocolate shade that it has. Since creating this list I’ve also written Jingle Berry (day 8) dry and Spiced Apple (day 5) is about to join it. I’m likely going to be forced to dump and clean out some of these pens, but my goal is to try and write and sketch…

 Another time, this same moon, which free-hands its flat arc across a fathomless slate of nighttime sky, supplied so much duplicitous reason that the warmest stretch ever of endless kissing seemed also to signal an endless love. Have others believed in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire and the jazz and the lips touching just right? The palm of conversation folding in whatever tender confidence came to mind? No way, back then, could that peaceful walk at dusk— the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink over a tiny inland lake—have led to the sorry war to come, the saddest set of regrets that still colors my occasional wandering. How could once watching waves etching a shore have also meant the meanest goodbye would eventually roll its own way in? How could catching together the brilliance of high light glancing among bright white slopes have groomed a final run so treacherous…

As you can see from my reviews of Anita Brookner’s novels which are within the obituary I wrote on the occasion of her death in 2016, I thought I had her ‘pegged’ as an author of bitter-sweet stories of intelligent middle-class older women reflecting on their poor choices and their wasted lives.  These women were emotionally stilted, isolated from society and disappointed by men.  I admired her writing, her brilliantly perceptive descriptions and her often droll style, but I always had to be ‘in the mood’ to read a Brookner.

But…

An episode of Backlisted (about Raymond Chandler, of all people!) began as usual with the chat about who’d been reading what, and Andy Miller told the listeners about a Brookner novel I didn’t know, quite different to the others I had read:

Latecomers, he said, is an incredibly moving book about two men who came to England as…

• Wanting An Easy Life.

Michael Azgour – Snapshots from a Train [2015]Gandalf’s Gallery. Flickr.

“I don’t know that an easy life is really all that easy.”

Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is easy to assume, when we take a quick mental snapshot of someone appearing to be having a good life, that their days on earth are always like that…. happy, relaxed, trouble-free. Suspended in time, such mental images may never change; the subjects are preserved forever experiencing life as constantly joyful.

If we use a camera, these pictures represent moments that are truly frozen in perpetuity…… in the image below, the smile will never fade, the sun will always shine and the beautiful, lustrous, reflective bubbles will never burst…..

Yet can life ever be as ‘easy as pie?’ What would this even mean? (This phrase has actually developed from ‘easy as eating pie.’) Might our happy, bright bubbles never burst…

It was a good thing at school
or the office where I'm paid
to sit still and think
for eight hours a day
but it's a problem
the rest of the time

Does she want to be more than friends?
Why hasn't she texted me back?
Am I being too clingy?

Like a vaudeville plate spinning act
my thoughts spiral to desperation
I should learn to trust my instincts

I'm a moth and she's the flame
I just have to accept the singed wings

About the Poet:

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a collection of poets and poetry lovers in the Triangle region of North Carolina. His first poetry collection, Wednesday Night Regular, written in and about strip clubs, was published in 2013. His second, Milkshakes and Chilidogs, a chapbook of food inspired poetry was served in 2017. He was…