Michael Lee Johnson, a poet, editor, and businessman, was one of The Centrifugal Eye’s first literary contributors. In today’s Feature Friday Guest Event, Mr. Johnson shares with my readers another of his poems, and a bit of the inspiration behind it.
I Edit My Life
I edit my life
clothesline pins & clips
hang to dry,
dirty laundry,
I turn poetic hedonistic
in my early 70s
reviewing the joys
and the sorrows
of my journey.
I find myself wanting
a new review, a new product,
a new time machine,
a new internet space,
a new planet where
we small, wee creative
creatures can grow.
~Michael Lee Johnson
The inspiration for my poem, I Edit My Life, was the desire to write a brief, therefore, “edited” summation of 47 years of life — a movie flick, a theater experience — of passages, of events, of movements, of traveling through the years. Everything that I found dirty needed to be cleaned, but not always at the exact time I found it.
Sometimes, when you’re dirty, you don’t realize you need to be clean. You live your selfish life and are the actor in the dirty, dynamic event.
That is what I meant by the "hedonistic in my early 70s" reference in the poem. Not exactly a time when I paid attention to altering much of my behavior, either.
As a distressed, young adult making decisions about what’s right or wrong, about whether my country is right or wrong, I made the leap from involvement in the Vietnam War to becoming an exile in Canada. I felt hung-out-to-dry, left reviewing my sorrows, regrets, and joys along the Trans-Canada highway.
After 10 years of exile and reexamination, and with a jagged return trip to the United States, “I hang to dry,” “clothesline pins & clips.”
After years of instability, I arrived home to a new jungle of advanced technology, such as the Internet, and handheld devices. Thankfully, a few other considerations helped me to stabilize my life: having my condo paid off certainly helps; the mutual love affair with my wonderful cat, Nikki, 19 years old, nearly 20, and living together all that time in the same residence; owning a business dealing in promotional, advertising products for many years now; maintaining a stable, compromising relationship with a significant other.
I have worked hard to calm my reactive behaviors. Yet, even now, occasionally reacting impulsively gets me in trouble, though I still manage to hang myself out to dry without much negative consequence.
After three failed marriages by 1978, I figured out that I was not doing well with intimate relationships. I tired of calling my aging mother, at the time saying, “Mom, it is over again.” I finally recognized that sex is not the real core of a relationship, rather, that a compromise for companionship leads to a longer-term friendship. I still live alone, knowing the boundaries are better for my partner and I, both, in our separate dwelling places.
Though I have embarked on a new journey, distant from the past I once lived, a new time machine, life is still but a blinking eye. It’s a journey where the breathing sometimes stops, and I look with hope for a new planet, another new beginning. And maybe this time, I will edit as I go along.
You can listen to and watch me reading I Edit My Life on YouTube.
~Michael Lee Johnson
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois. Mr. Johnson has been published in more than 930 literary publications. His poems have appeared in 33 countries. He edits and publishes 10 different poetry websites. He has been nominated for 2 Pushcart Prize awards for poetry in 2015, and for Best of the Net 2016.
Mr. Johnson is the editor-in-chief of the anthology, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze, available on Amazon, and editor-in-chief of a second poetry anthology, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses, which is also available on Amazon.
You can find 134 videos of Mr. Johnson’s poems on YouTube.