The beginning

I'm the type of person who has read the first thirty pages of every book that's out there. Tolstoy? Yep. Fitzgerald? You bet. But reading the first few pages of a great work does not allow one to truly immerse themselves in the world that a great author can create. Call it ADD, call it independence of vision, call it laziness, all are correct.
Did I mention I have started at least 50 journals? I'd burn through the first few entries and then realize that my life is completely boring and stop, only to have something worth writing about come up and, three entries later, have my momentum destroyed by the ennui of everyday life.
But no more!
I have decided to join the online army of uninteresting knuckleheads with computers and start a blog. My own blog. But this will be no ordinary blog, no sir. This blog will include poetry I've written (because everyone just loooooves reading poetry) short stories, movie reviews, general rants about life, and enough humor to make you forget that you should probably be doing something more productive than surfing the internet and reading the blog of someone whom you more than likely only know tangentially, if at all.

By the way, my name is Mark, nice to meet you.

Now that we've got the formalities out of the way, why don't we start with a poem? This poem was inspired by a recent mushroom trip I went on before a Perpetual Groove concert. It's kind of hippie poetry meets Billy Collins.

The Electric Tower
Fear was an electric tower that grew from the grassy field,
it spoke in a strange language of crackles and hisses,
exploding all the while in waves of incandescent light.
I observed the man made edifice through the campfire,
Watched its steel bars undulate with the rising heat,
Organic in a movement that profaned the night sky.
Like all things we are vessels for energy.
Through us both it flows,
in its presence we crackle and hiss
but I am free to roam.
It is of the landscape of one place but I may be of many.
I may ride its electric cable as it snakes along desert highways and into homes,
across vast canyons and into the coldest depths of the underground,
speaking all the while a great multitude of languages.
But I am still so very small, my energy weak,
so I averted my eyes from this thing
that would be worshipped as God in ancient times.