As many of you know, I am in the process of putting my first full length manuscript together. It’s frustrating and daunting, mostly because I want to put all my poems in chronological order (I write a lot of narrative poems). It worked with Stealing Dust, but I know that with a bigger collection, I have more room to play. I’ve been looking at other full-length collections, and I realize that most poets do not place their works in chronological order, even if they write narrative poems. So, now, I have been busy organizing my poems according to theme and tone. That has helped. But then, I realized that certain symbols and images appear again and again. In the past I have mentioned that dead birds show up a lot in my writing, and I have at least four poems in this collection with dead birds. Furthermore, there’s a lot of splinters, dust, makeup stains, cigarettes,and heels floating around in my works. Do these images all go together? I hope so.
As for the picture above, I promised myself that The Scrapper Poet would not become a “cat blog” but I had to post a picture of Lola helping me compile my manuscript. She likes my dead bird poems.
The Scrapper Poet 
