Blade for Hire and Publishing Poetry

    A hired blade, a ronin, masterless and wandering.  For the Japanese samurai, it was a curse.  For me, a blessing.  With boning blade and scimitar, I have the opportunity to wander like Himura Kenshin, only with my blade fixed to the front to slice, cut, dice, and otherwise draw blood (or at least myoglobin).
    

    Each summer my company offers a seasonal, internal hiring process to work in booming tourist town stores along the coasts of the Carolinas.  Agreeing to such an adventure comes with an equal set of perks and downsides.  
    
    The PERKS:
        $2/hr. raise.  Guaranteed overtime of 10+hours a week for four months.  Room and board provided by the company.  Plus you’ll be living at the beach, which is a perk in and of itself.  Also, I would be a short drive away from Eva.

    The DOWNSIDE:
        Rooming with three other employees, chosen at random, in a two-bedroom apartment for the duration.  Better hope they’re cool.  Also I would have to cancel my turkey hunting trip.

    But the perks outweigh the downside.  In a tourist town during the summer, no matter how much your roommates blow as human beings, there’s no reason to sit around the apartment anyhow.  There’s fish at the pier that need catching, turkeys in the national forest begging for a wad of 3.5” #5 shot, single women in dive bars, plenty of good places to eat, sights to see, things to do.  Oh yeah, plus that whole work thing.  There’s always plenty of that to go around and plenty of money flowing into the bank account to thoroughly enjoy your time off.

    I find out in a day or two whether my application was approved.  And at that point I will only have a few short weeks to plan and prepare for a four month adventure.

    In the meantime I have actual good news, not hopes and dreams and if’s and when’s, to focus on.  For the first time in twelve years, I am a published writer again.  This time for poetry.  Ok, so maybe I didn’t score some high-paying, prestigious publication.  But I’ll settle for the South’s oldest online literary journal: The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.  It’s a start.  I can get my work out there.  Plus, I’ve published there before, over a decade ago.  


        This recent piece is a short poem entitled “Time” which reminisces about an episode of my youth when I shot a doe as she stood by her fawn…and I could not find a blood trail.  I contemplate the mindset of the fawn and how it relates to my own experiences, ending the poem with the question: “how can time heal all wounds when sometimes it takes a while for wounds to bleed?”  I first wrote it when I was 24.  No one would publish it.  I rewrote it at 35.  And finally found a taker.

    Things are finally looking up.  And I feel optimistic for once.  Excited.  The joy of your 30’s is that you’re old enough to know better, but still young enough to do it anyway.  I need some adventure in my life.  Forty is right around the corner.  And I’ll write about it the whole way.

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