A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Six-Hundred-And-Twenty-Six

I have been working hard to make my poetry more honest.  I don't mean by this that I have not been truthful in my writing, rather that I want to be able to be more straightforward and speak of things in a direct and clear way.  It can be difficult to just tell the plain and simple truth of things, especially when those things are emotionally charged.  Sometimes it is a matter of the emotions making it difficult to be clear, or it can be a matter of the ego and the instinct to protect myself, or even the desire to not hurt others I care about.  I am certain that these are not the only reasons, and I suspect I don't really even understand the real ones all that fully.  I know that I am making a lot of progress, at least in some sense, even if I am still struggling towards a greater degree of openness right at the moment.  For a long time, I almost never wrote poems that even tried to tackle personal matters directly, and now I am writing a great deal of poems that are more directly about my own life and which attempt to transparently explore my thoughts and feelings.