Well, I finished it . . . which is to say I finished the first draft. Now comes the tinkering.

The poem is (as does often happen when I'm in the zone) structurally and thematically sound. Most of the revision will involve smaller things--word choice, dramatic intensifiers, line breaks, punctuation, syntax, excision of unnecessary verbal offshoots, etc.

Eleven pages. It's been a long time since I wrote such a long poem.

I feel hungover, as if I might need to take a nap at 9 a.m. in order to get through the rest of the day.

In other words, now I have to go back to being an ordinary person who is not writing an eleven-page poem. That's not as easy as it sounds.