I just can’t leave things be.

I've been (obsessively) tinkering with my two poetry manuscripts.

I had an idea to combine them. At first this seemed impossible. I had 60+ pages of urban, soulful, narrative poems, and 50+ pages of surreal and disjointed abstract poems. But I've been playing around with the pieces and it might work. The themes wander along similar lines, as does the imagery. Also, I trimmed cellulite from some poems, and divorced myself from others - not sure what I ever saw in them, anyway.

My recent poems are cleaner, shorter, and less elaborate than my early work. I'm tempted to revise the older poems. But I can't bring myself to change them into something more like what I'm writing now. It feels like someone else created them, and they're perfectly fine in their own way, and I just can't make them anything more than what they are. And I'd be ecstatic to have them published in a book, but I'm growing farther and farther away from them.

When I looked at the recent poems in light of the others, they fit together reasonably well. They bounce against each other, causing an interesting amount of friction. The surreal ones seemingly tug the other ones in that direction more so than standing alone.

I need to come up with a title. Maybe a hybrid of the two manuscripts’ names...perhaps the The Blues Handbook or My Own Brand of Truth or something entirely different?

It would make me slightly less anxious to know there's only one manuscript out there and not two of them that may never get published. Of course on the slim chance either gets accepted on their own in the meantime, all this babbling is all null and void.