I’ve been thinking about this train, and about writing; I can’t seem to get enough done lately. I used to write a poem – a rough draft – on a 10 minute coffee break. Now I start trying to get geared up for writing after dinner, and it can be midnight before I get a word on the screen. I suspect the people around me wonder at how I waste so much solitude, while I feel I can’t seem to get enough. But then I’m lonely. I reach out to you.

Here’s an excerpt from a book, Reporting, by David Remnick of the New Yorker, from a section on Phillip Roth:

“I live alone, there’s no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with,” Roth said. “My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day … If I wake up at two in the morning — this happens rarely but it sometimes happens — and something has dawned on me, I turn on the light and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read til all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”

I don’t want his life. I just want to understand mine. Which brings me to the train I mentioned earlier. Writing poems when I was younger, more spontaneous maybe, was like a car that travels 10 miles from my town of Carpinteria to Santa Barbara in 10 minutes in a 65 mph zone. Writing the stuff I’m writing these days is like a train, traveling the same 10 miles from a dead stop, with the same speed limit. It’s not getting there in 10 minutes, because for the first mile it’s doing 20, then a mile or two at 30, then 40, 50, and maybe it won’t even get up to 60 mph before it has to start braking to stop in Santa Barbara.

That’s why I need time. It takes so damn long to get up to speed. And maybe if you’re passing me in your Ford Explorer, you could waive. Or honk. I might be asleep at the switch.