Self-promotion doesn’t bother me.  My motto might be this  — If I don’t, who will?   But this entry isn’t completely self- promoting.  If you are reading my daily Twitter piece,  that’s lovely.   But this blog entry is just my usual, rather aimless musing on something.  In this case Twitter.

I think I once said in print that I’d never  be a Twitter-er and had no use for Facebook.  But I started a Twitter account because the independent press that publishes my poetry books (Red Hen Press) urged all their writers to have, ahem, “that presence.”

So I took a look at what other Twitter folks were up to and at first  just didn’t get it.  Talk about sublunary.  Then I found some clever things and wondered if that wasn’t, as they used to say, the ticket.
I’m sure lots of people have said how much like haiku Twitter can be, and that’s what piqued my interest.  Something compact and runic could be right up my alley.  And mysterious.  And funny.

Harder, of course, than it looked.  That’s why I started to write about the Albino Alligator.  I could manufacture an episode every morning.  I’d do my best to move the story along and to have at least one interesting/surprising word or phrase in the post.

It was fun.  It was hard.  Maybe what I objected to about the usual Twitter piece is how the writers stepped into the same river every day.  But not everybody did that.  And I wouldn’t let myself.

I liked the Albino Alligator.  I looked forward to having him eat people.  Then civilization got to be too much for him, and he went deeper into the swamp.  So my aunt stepped forward and said, “Ronnie, write about me.”

I’m doing that now.  She was ill a very long time before she passed, and I love seeing her again in her beautiful clothes.  When I was five or so and she’d come to visit in the winter, she’d slip into my bedroom and cover me up with  w/ her fur coat.  As often as not, she’d leave w/out it because I was sleeping so soundly and she had another one.

Isn’t that a story worth telling?

RK