No on part but it’s no big deal. I do those for fun and most are unpaid and help students.

I’m not particularly concerned about the journal though the pen wrote well. The biggest loss was my rewriting of a poem I was trying to write on a suicide. One afternoon in Tampa at our apartment a woman Flung herself from a high balcony to her death. I called it in. It was a curious experience where I really felt nothing. Never knew her name or if she was even a resident. She was not clothed from the chest down and struck a metal rail. Watching everyone’s reactions who wandered up on it before police arrived was interesting.

What did make me angry was a couple across the way who sat on their porch all day, adjusted their chairs to see better when police arrived and made it their entertainment. My wife and I were both incensed about that and later when I found out people snapped photos with their cell phones. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but I wanted to ask them why they didn’t go to funeral homes to snap photos of the dead. What the hell were they going to do with them? Post a suicide’s twisted ruin? Stare at it privately at home with ghoulish delight? Share with friends a mostly nude dead person?

I had trouble reconciling all these feelings and still am trying to write a poem about it. Writing poems and riddles are sort of my thing especially in the Anglo-Saxon methods. I am pretty harsh on social issues but none are published. This situation is tougher. The lost journal was the most recent re-write but it’s not as if the memories are going anywhere. So the journal loss is an irritant more than anything else.

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