Here's an interesting anomaly.

1. How I feel this week about my writing: slow, distracted, pained, impatient, clumsy, incompetent, unintelligent, ungrammatical, etc.

2. How readers are responding to this week's blog posts: "Lately it seems so many of your entries are just excellent. 'At the moment I'm defining it as "like an overcast morning in a bare forest."' Wow. You must be hitting some kind of stride. Anyway, it's the voice of a real poet speaking, all right. Without pretensions or affectation."

If you can overlook the fact that posting this friend's comment looks like "pretensions or affectation," perhaps you can allow yourself to pause in wonder over the peculiarities of perception. Of course, part of my problem is that I've been writing about William Blake, who in the margins of the books he's reading scrawls comments such as "Severity of judgment is a great virtue" and "damn sneerers" and "Is not this Very Very Contemptible Contempt is the Element of the Contemptible," and so on and so on. And in this commissioned essay I'm laboring over, I'm supposed to be pretending that this man is reading and commenting on one of my poems. No wonder I feel like a croaking frog.

Meanwhile, the sun has decided to shine, and there's a hen squawking in the chicken house. Meanwhile, I'm in the mood to drink too much coffee and play all my Clash records in a row, one right after another and rowdy enough to make the hypothetical neighbors shout.

But the hen needs to be fed.