(December 20, 2018/ Illustration: segment of illustration for book cover by Juan Ibanez)

This morning Alta delivered the box of my poem book, Mearcstapa. This has been a project postponed for decades (funny that as you age you can say this about more and more ‘things’) and the most recent step in my Kick the Bucket Tour project (more about that some other time) that I began last year with my poems book Bitácora de Vuelo.

My brother Juan had for long insisted that we should put it out (when I say for long I mean decades since we were in California) and I always found a new one in the wagon train of ‘priorities’ you can turn your life into. We even played with different formats that went nowhere. Well, the time to summarize, package and tie loose ends is rapidly approaching, would not like to leave loose ends hanging. Time to take care of business.

The production by Alta is top as always and Juan’s illustrations for the cover and the first of the two poems capture the essence of the book. One thing that we could not have done back then and maybe actually make our procrastination a blessing in disguise is that now it was possible to have JRocket, my daughter, illustrate the second of the two poems, Epílogo, actually the first one I wrote all those decades ago in Stony Brook. She did a great dark job of it.

I added for good measure a monologue that I wrote as a separate project many years later when we arrived in Gainesville. And after running into the hallucinatory Lunar Caustic, by Lowery. Again, had we done this earlier it would have appeared without this piece that I think is a pretty good coda to the two poems unit.

I think that the textual collage experiment still holds pretty well and it is passing the ‘prueba del tiempo’. I had put the text aside time ago when I was still quite enthusiastic about the iconoclastic young poet attitude, before I desisted of the whole young poet trip and became a baker turned small business owner turned coding enthusiast. While editing now, I was looking at the technical aspect of the whole project and it is now that the job is finished that I can sit and read it as a finished article. And was pleasantly surprised that it seems to me that the piece can still stand on its own.

Contrary to last year’s book, this one we considered was not a good candidate to be part of our Christmas morning gift packages. We will leave it out and I will share it with individuals that I think would be interested.

Now, on to close the ‘narratives’ chapter and then take to the road to pay my last respects and final good-bys to old friends I have not seen for way too long.