the bestiary cycle

I find myself unable to write prose or drama for the past few days (you may have noticed the sudden lack of vignettes).

I find myself mired in a blue funk - not mindlessly depressed, mind you, but still quite down.

Normally, my escape is to write. I have found, that in previous times of profound angst and depression, I am able to write up a storm, some of it quite good.

This time, however, I am paralyzed by the concept of length. Anything akin to a long-term commitment (which includes short fiction, given the way I construct it) turns me off. Perhaps it's indicative of what I'm going through, but still. It's irksome to me that I cannot write a story or two.

Hence the poems. In all honestly, I do not consider myself a poet (even if for some odd reason I have an award for poetry). I find that I lack the lyricism and much of the fundamentals that elevate verse into something sublime. I hardly ever attempt to critique poetry. I am a fake poet - simple as that. (Or, yes, maybe I'm too hard on myself.) But what I can do is to render into poetic form some of the thoughts that I intended to be stories - in particular, a small cycle of stories about female monsters.

That's the rationale for the five poems that form what I so cannily call the Bestiary Cycle (isn't the title just the height of arrogance? Believe me, I know).

I wanted to use female monsters from legend and myth and infuse them with day-to-day modern day notions about love, sex and relationships. Do they work? Perhaps if you read them aloud. I'm willing to bet that a smidgen of the dramatist in me occassionally peeks through.