The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag

The Little Temple
of My Sleeping Bag
Dancing Girl Press. USA.
September 2014. Buy it here.

Over time, I took to packaging my ideas and to marketing them outside of literary salons. At first, only continuum-based mothers, i.e. gals who made due without secretaries, without high heels, and without the other trappings of earlier lives, took interest. Later, the revealed snippets of my passions and the glimmering certainties of my articulated experiences found homes beyond the ken of maternal sorts. Bikers, hikers, and would-be divas of the cyber world read a page here, an expanded text there. In the end, my varied audiences shared an interest in words about personal growth and development.

Folks grasped that by sampling reminders about childhood victories or about adolescent angst, they could mine wisdom. Even the least accolade-laden publications seemed to have a sweet spot for glimpses into probable versions of the difficulties we pass through during the early stages of life. Nonetheless, my readers, my editors, and my self glided past the important notion that real or imagined accounts of youth are fashioned according to reports of adult years. Poetry or prose set down about decades past can’t help but be servile to “mature” understandings. To wit, if social history is the province of the winner of wars, then personal history is the province of old souls. As fully formed beings, we simply have more vocabulary, more manners of manipulating narratives, and more access to textual venues than do children.

Accordingly, in word play, a reference to an object as innocent as a sleeping bag might cull sexual innuendo even if it’s meant to point merely to images of camping out on a friend’s livingroom floor. Thus, when intentionally juxtaposing innocent referents with sophisticated ones, we necessarily create fresh syntheses. It’s not so much that grownups are tainted as it is that we command a mindfulness of the here and now as well as of the there and then. Wee ones, in contrast, mostly live the present.

For that reason, The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag begins with adult remonstrations about life and only thereafter morphs into a duet between memories and realizations. It is that layered tension, which arises first between supposed veracities and supposed recollections, and then between supposed veracities and the average sentiment of the nexus of self knowledge and self tribute that creates the tang in this assemblage.

Hence, you are invited to settle yourself, if only for the night, in The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag’s warmth and insulation. The material in this book is not waterproof. Its underlying surface is assuredly bumpy and otherwise full of splinters. Yet, the thrill this work provides, of being able to consider, simultaneously, how events look from a child’s perspective and from the vantage point of an older person proves to be a relatively portable means for getting through personal evolutions.

The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag
Preface

1. Awareness
1.1 For this Poetic Moment
1.2 In the Little Temple of my Sleeping Bag
1.3 A June Full of Cherries
1.4 On a Rocketship to Jupiter
1.5 Vendomatics in Urban Palaces
1.6 It’s not about the Sex
1.7 Reduced Acuity
1.8 Hey along the Sides
1.9 So Many Do-Bees
1.10 Like Moving through Mercury
1.11 Undercurrent: A Parallel Universe for Sylvia Plath

2. Alleged Innocence
2.1 Gooey with Clay, Peanut Butter, and Snot: Intergenerational Faceoff
2.2 Literal Definition
2.3 Fruitloops are Never Enough
2.4 Kitten
2.5 Morally Tall Friends: Eucalyptus’ Lessons
2.6 Death of Slowpoke
2.7 Enough Brittle Leaves, Fingernails on Chalkboards
2.8 Infatuation, More Honestly
2.9 Growing Like Lemongrass
2.10 Me and Superfool: Surprise Catharsis for an Adolescent’s Imaginings
2.11 Growth

Acknowledgements
Credits
About the Author