Welcome to my web, my capturing device, my frayed asterisk at the corner. Not complete but drawing your attention, marking out a space. It is violent, strategic, and imprisoning. It is beautiful, vulnerable, and strong.

I connect you to the words that connect you to yourself.

But do I have to write a blog?

Some words feature their ugly with a sound and mouth feel that lingers after the word is gone (sludge, gusset, fetid, moist). Like acid colors and triangle patterns in nature, they warn you to stay away.

Others engage the sickly boniness of their aristocratic inbreeding (pulchritude, bucolic, effulgence) to simply scare you off & save them from doing work. And some are linguistic carrion flowers that lure you in with their liquid sibilance before springing their deadly denotations (acquiesce, hirsute, silverfish).

But a word like blog doesn’t threaten or disdain or tease. It doesn’t do anything but sit, like a tepid lump of beige (not even griege)—unformed, flabby, & tired.

Blog is the sole-surviving syllable of a shantytown portmanteau: weblog. Blog has survivor’s guilt. It’s a purposely ugly word, blog. There has to be something better.

So today, and probably tomorrow, I will explore other words to denote and connote this weblog of musings, missives, and meanderings. This confluence of ephemera, this commonplace, this capturing device.

Paula Diaz Paula Diaz

Restart.

All of this is a long way around to trying to write about something I can’t quite recall.

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Paula Diaz Paula Diaz

The Edit, pt 1.

But it’s not about doing the verb, but rather about inhabiting the noun created by the action of paring down. Edit as place.

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Paula Diaz Paula Diaz

You Were Never Me

It’s intertextuality if you acknowledge moving into and remodeling someone else’s poem; plagiarism if you don’t.

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Paula Diaz Paula Diaz

PTSD ca. 1979

The blanketing cocoon not the breakable chrysalis a child creates in the business of metamorphosing into an adult.

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Paula Diaz Paula Diaz

Equity.

Am I going to teach Hamlet with the same materials I always have or will I start all over again because that old stuff will no longer make sense to this new me?

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