the title

A ballast for planets is a line from a poem I wrote.  Sorry again Wally, lets have less about you and more about me, which fits in perfectly with this attempt to  explain the title 'A ballast for planets'...it is based on egocentricity, me, as everyone who knows me, am a very selfish person.  Its true, I know, you know and if you don't well, I know it and thats the most important part of the equation.

'Ballast;, that thing which gives stability to an object, as in a ship or a submarine etc.  I think myself that important that I am the ballast for planets.  I'm not cocky about my egocentricism too often so Im letting it be at the moment.  The poem goes as:

A Tangle

I was born

from a dream of dogwoods,

adrift in a murmur between salt and sin.

I was bruised

by the aging of brotherhood,

While breathing in old flecks of insect skin.

My eyes were

wide as the Always,

thick as the Ever, stronger than whalebone.

The body built me,

A ballast for planets;

my heart the sheen of God’s birthstone.

The Word and Its children

went sifting through my wild foam hair.

I ball my fists up to fight off all the shapes of despair.

The sky in her flat blue glory

Will not reward me for the tears I cry.

The Moon, he hung himself to calm my worry, but still I ask her why.

I take now to

the pulling out of tangled things.

I split my chest open, I accept what the seasons bring.

I stand dreaming

At the viscous edge of evening.

I offer up what lay between my hat and boots.

The water, she will hear me and transform my body.

              She will give me back to the relief of dying roots.


--So I wrote this in a few stages,  within a few day after dreaming about dogwoods while falling to sleep and humming the song 'The Mountain' by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer.   I have been thinking about dogwoods alot because of another song, 'Wagon Wheel' by Old Crow Medicine Show.  In that song the narrator talks about making good time hitching down through Noerth Caroline where he picks his sweetheart a 'bouquet of doooowg-wood flowers'.  I am extremely influenced by the music i listen too, especially folk, indie folk, modern americana/folky country and modern stringband-bluegrassy types.  I'm not professing to be a connoisseur in any of these genres, I've encountered some of their musics and have been pleasantly astounded.

So, I had in mind as I drifted away 'The Mountain' and I had just seen Tracy Grammer perform the song live in a little Arts Center down in Watchung, NJ  for my birthday just a few days earlier.   The song begins "I was born in a fork-tongued story, raised up by merchants and drugstore liars..." 

So I awoke, thinking about dogwoods, myself, and where amid the ether we have come from.  What was the blueprint for this 'being' I'm becoming?  It just sort of came together.  I purposely crafted it into a sonnet-esque form because I had been challenged by a former High School English teacher, Stephen Sangirardi to write some sonnets.  This was originally in a standard sonnet form,  but after the challenge was met, with moderate approval, I reshaped it to its present state.   I forgot what grade Mr. Sangirardi gave me for the 'assignment', an A perhaps.  Surely he wouldn't give me much less, lets say perhaps, a C-; besides, I had just purchased his first novel 'Monday Afternoon', as promised.  We were being honest with our literary opinions, I suspect he was holding back. 

But I am the ballast for planets, I am kept stable(sane) by my planetlike ego, the downside of this flippant selfishness is that in my keeping my self from shipwrecking, I don't work well with others.  I have been apologizing alot as of late for past wrongs and continued errors and I suspect it won't end anytime too soon.  So, a ballast for planets, keep me on the straight and narrow and wipe the self-interest and easily agitated dust from God's birthstone and show the real sheen beneath that I think myself to be truly made of.