Tirelessly Speeding Them

Today's Prompt: Titles. If you wrote a book about your life, your community, your condition, or your Health Activism – what would you title it? Come up with 5 working titles. What about your biography?

I ruminated on this prompt in 2011. I came up with working titles for all of those things. I don't think I was satisfied with any of them.

To say that I'm particular about titles would be an understatement. It's often the last thing I add to a post. The element of a poem to which I gave the most consideration. Sadly, I spend more time crafting a title than I do drafting the content. My titles often allude to something in literature or song. Or they have a double meaning. Or they're funny.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order."

I'm a poet. As silly as it may sound to declare that in most modern circles, I am. My heart will always be in poetry before it is in song or prose. I don't create much poetry because, the older I get, the more deficient I find my attempts. I'll keep writing until I get it right. I forget which author said that that's why we continue to write. We write because we haven't said it the right way yet.

I think every title holds the potential for poetry. The best of the best words in a single line. Sometimes a single word.

And at the end of the day, I'm honestly not ready to slap a title on my life. Titles are the last thing I do. I'm not there yet. You'll find my title on my tombstone if you care to read me that long.

Until then, you can find me here, sitting over a post for an extra half hour, thinking about what to call it before I hit Publish. Wishing it were poetry.

That's me, second from right, 8 months after diagnosis, in March of 1991.
I was photographed for the local paper for winning a poetry competition.