Written after a fight with an ex, and the requisite beer binge that followed…
Screams
The ex wife screams
Eugene O’Neill at me
In south Rhodesian
Dialects
I scream at her
A Gertrude Stein For Christ’s
Sake For Christ’s sake For
Sake Forsake
And neither one
Can comprehend the one
Who’s talking but that’s
Typical
You say you want some apocalypse? Here’s a glimpse of a personal vision…
The French Quarter was a human junkyard, bodies piled on top of bodies, throbbing and writhing with music no one could really hear and would pay no attention to anyway, the movement less rhythmic than sexual, a collective thrust between the legs of the city. The man pressing against my back gurgled, about to vomit, and I knew it would splatter onto my head and run down the back of my shirt, but I was helpless to get away, to move at all save for the almost-gentle back and forth wahhh-wahhh of the crowd. The woman to my right was topless, her breasts too rigid in the chaos to be real. Beads hung from her neck and both ears, her dead-fish eyes glazed over. I watched as a hand snaked around her waist and began pinching her right nipple. She did not notice. For all I knew she was dead. In the thronging masses she would have had no room to fall.
Back when I thought I might be a poet, I wrote this as an introduction to a collection that I might publish someday. These days, I’m confident in my prose, but not so much in my poems, so I don’t know that any of those works will ever appear in print, other than on this blog. I offer the introduction here because it tells you how I feel about poetry–why I read it and still try to write it. Your thoughts are welcome.
Introduction: On the Club Tour and other Figures of Speech
To most everyone but poets and academics, poetry is effectively dead. It’s part of our past, something that should be on display in the Smithsonian. And like many such displays, it is easily overlooked, a hulking shape that fades into the scenery of the great Museum of our lives. Most people look at poetry and nod, stifle a yawn, and move onto the next exhibit. Occasionally they might spot an item of interest, one that beckons them to pause and consider. But for the most part, they seem ready to get the tour over with so they can get home in time to catch the Yankees and Red Sox on ESPN.
This elaborate conceit is not my metaphor of choice, though. I liken poetry to 1980s hair-metal bands. The genre ain’t dead; it’s just not playing arena shows anymore. Now you’re more likely to find it jamming on stage in the seedier part of town, where the smoke is thick and the pool tables have so many blood stains that they look like relief maps and the beer is stronger than the odor of the bouncers. Poetry looks older now, its hair streaked with gray, its eyes crow-footed and seemingly always on the verge of tears. The audience consists of die-hard fans with beer guts and twenty-year-old concert shirts; of the odd suit from the label, the one dispatched to measure how many tickets are sold and, therefore, whether there might be enough interest for a greatest hits package; of ambivalent drunks who hope to score with the slutty chicks with the big hair and fake boobs. In a lot of ways, the scene is pathetic.
But put poetry in front of the right crowd and the old magic can reappear. Sometimes the singer drags that old barbaric yawp from way down in the diaphragm. At times like these, the lines and stanzas sometimes seem to come fully formed, without conscious thought or action. It’s the moment when emotion and human experience condense into a few well-turned phrases, when the raw truth of being erupts from the singer and into a deep place in the audience, so that all they can do is bang their heads, raise their hands in unison, and shout
Yes!
Moments like these are what poets live for, when just one reader finds that, for the space of a line or a phrase or a word, everything is exactly right. And one great, tragic truth of writing is that you seldom know whether or not such moments occur.
Of course, for many readers (and for far too many alleged writers), poetry is nothing so transcendent. To them, poetry is cute. It’s the roses-are-red love poem or its bawdy parody that we all memorized in sixth grade. It’s the patriotic screed set to rhyme, inspirational didacticism in ABAB. These so-called poems have no rhythm, no meter, no reason to rhyme except that that’s what so many people think poetry is supposed to do. It’s enough to make you cry, and you would, except that somebody might write a bad poem about it.
Others seem to have some idea of what poetry can and should be, yet they seem intent on ruining their own work by throwing in some all-knowing, here’s-the-point-I’m-getting-at statement. These lines hit the reader about the head and shoulders like a brickbat. Forget image and repetition and symbol; what we apparently need from these writers is meaning, and only one meaning at that. No room for growth, for interpretation, for experiences other than one’s own—even the reader-response critics could do little with these.
I try to avoid these pitfalls when I’m on stage. I hope I got some things right. I don’t know if my work is another sad club date in a genre whose time is passing or a gig that proves the old band can still crank it up pretty well. I hope for the latter. All I know is that I’m still ready to pull up my stool and jam.
This club’s got no drink minimum and a pretty small cover charge. Imbibe with me and let’s see how long the party can last.
A seven-year-old piece I found in my files–flash fiction or journal entry? You decide.
February 15, 2004
Quentin Compson once broke the face of his watch and ripped the hands from its face in an effort to stop time, but he could still hear the minute ticking of the second hand as it spoke away the hours even in its own absence. In this house there are six clocks and two watches and three VCRs and three computers and one microwave. They all tell time. Sometimes this fact is too much to bear.
Here’s a short one I wrote WAY back after my first divorce. I don’t know if it’s any good or not, but call it a look at one moment in time, lived in another life.
At Night
Sometimes I miss you
At night when the lights
Are out and I fail
To see who is not
Here though I still hear
Your breath
February 12, 2004
He awoke at seven that morning, knowing that the day would bring him more happiness than grief, and yet he still felt a cold ball of dread in his stomach, sitting there like lead, weighing him down. He knew that swinging his body around and allowing his feet to touch the floor would commit him to getting out of bed, and that standing up and getting dressed would commit him to leaving his bedroom, and that appearing in the house would commit him to staying for her party.
His daughter was now old enough to drive. She could ask for the keys at any moment, and he would have no choice but to hand them over or be branded an uncool Dad. Perhaps he could throw them out the window? But then that would make it tough for him to use the car himself. Maybe he could drop them in the toilet. That would keep any self-respecting teenager at a distance. Hell, that would drive away most adults.
But he was merely avoiding the inevitable. She was growing up. Soon she would be old enough to leave for college, to get a full-time job, to marry and have kids of her own, to follow that career or that husband to some city on the other side of the country. He might be able to see her once a year, if she could get away. They might talk a couple of times a week.
He wondered if she would understand this, that he was not afraid of her driving the car or how much taller than him she might eventually become. He was afraid of the first time that car turned a corner and left him behind, waving, wondering if she were even looking back, the first of many journeys that he would not even be able to watch.
I’m still hoping to get back to writing new stuff soon. I’ve got some ideas for rants and essays on here, and I’d still like to practice creative nonfiction before I try to send any out. In the meantime, here’s another blast from the past, selected randomly. Perhaps it sucks; perhaps it will change your life.
Nomad
Last night the moon fell.
It exploded in
A field, gouging depths
In the dark landscape.
Nearby, a cold river
Flowed to nowhere else.
Today he fails to
See the blank hole in
The sky. He walks through
Fields of asphalt and
Drinks bitter air from
Riverless facades.
Cities never miss the moon.
Couching on the grass,
Wrapped around a cup
Of frozen peace, leg
Shot off by dead men,
He collects loose change
And ignores children.
Symbiote from wars
Leeching babies born
When he could stand straight,
He defends his name
From unseen monsters
And dying ideals
When the moon comes up again.
In catching up on all the things I didn’t do last week, I’m still too behind to post anything new. So here’s another old piece of flash fiction. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it. Perhaps you’ll have a theory.
Her lover had come back from the dead and was standing in her kitchen, drinking a cup of herbal tea and eating one of her homemade scones. He was holding the cup with three fingers, as he had done on the mornings after their lovemaking had been most intense and memorable. Steam rose above the rim and drifted toward his face, disappearing in his beard, now flecked with gray and bushier than she remembered. He said
Hello
and she screamed. The fear in her voice startled him. He managed to hold onto the scone but dropped the tea, the cup turning slowly one and a half times before it hit the tile and shattered, the liquid spattering his boots and the legs of the table. It spread across the floor like blood, running into the cracks between the tiles where it formed shallow, linear pools.
Today I had to take my son and my youngest daughter back after having them at my place during their spring break. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for nearly twenty years, and it never gets easier. This is how it feels.
Non-Custodial
You wave goodbye as they drive
Away, already mauling video game
Aliens and tapping their feet to
The rhythm of a song you’ve never
Heard of, forgetting their promise to
Look back before they vanish this time.
Or perhaps you sprint madly for the car,
Slam the door and clasp the seatbelt,
Reverse gear down the drive and
Rooster-tail through gravel to the nearest bar,
Leaving them to wave at your taillights
As your façade collapses in their wake.
You cannot betray their belief in
Your stoicism, your ability to take
The separation with blank aplomb.
You must remain an optimist, the
Guardian of their right to devastation.
But you can never cry.
Instead you must spout cheerful platitudes
That echo false in your throat.
They might as well be slogans
Advertising incremental hells:
“Only two weeks” and “next summer”
And “before you know it” and “soon.”
If you say it long enough,
One day you might believe yourself.
February 20th, 2004
I signed an online petition today. I don’t know what it was for. Perhaps I was trying to save something. Maybe I was helping kill someone. Maybe it was a petition against me. I don’t know. All I remember is clicking on a button and then shutting down my browser. It was all over in a few seconds, and it might have been the most important thing I’ll ever do.