Potluck: What's Left Over

When I began organizing my poetry, I intended to have the last collection be called “Mediocrity” and include the poems that weren’t bad enough to throw away and weren’t good enough to make the cut for the other collections. I had thought that I could make up with quantity what might be lacking in quality, and that would be that. However, I ran into a bit of a snag when I finished organizing my collections since quite a few of the ones that were left over weren’t mediocre. Some were, but not enough of them to warrant calling the collection as a whole “Mediocrity.” Instead, what was left over were poems that didn’t fit in with the thematic content of the other collections and did not relate particularly well to each other as a separate thematic collection of their own. That being said, Part 1 could be viewed as a chapbook, since it is a series of sonnets about mental disorders like OCD, hypochondriasis, schizophrenia, paranoia, and PTSD. When I wrote them, I was a student in psychology and was somewhat obsessed with writing sonnets. Parts 2-4 are a mishmash of odds and ends whose unifying theme is their randomness.