Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
She said...
Words, She said.
You're pretty good with words
she said But words don't pay the rent
Words won't save your life & words are not life
you're pretty good with words
she said
You have a good vocabulary & a nice way
of collating the lines
so that they appear
aesthetically pleasing on the page.
But words are just dumb sounds
she said
And that's what you have & it does what it do.
You have a certain way of jamming in one
after the other in cohesion until it makes a pleasant rhythm,
but it doesn't mean anything to me
and it doesn't mean anything to you either
You're pretty good with words
she said
but creating a numbing procession of meaningless sounds in single file
is not any way to make a living
nor is it any reason to feel so proud
You're pretty good with words
she said But words are only symbols assigned
to define
a feeling They are not
the feeling itself after all
You cannot produce a succession of symbolism in
lieu of the feeling
Especially in your case where you use words
you don't even know the meaning of
to express your love
You're alright with your words
she said
yet you wallow in their definitions
You're pretty good with words
she said But words don't pay the rent
Words won't save your life & words are not life
you're pretty good with words
she said
You have a good vocabulary & a nice way
of collating the lines
so that they appear
aesthetically pleasing on the page.
But words are just dumb sounds
she said
And that's what you have & it does what it do.
You have a certain way of jamming in one
after the other in cohesion until it makes a pleasant rhythm,
but it doesn't mean anything to me
and it doesn't mean anything to you either
You're pretty good with words
she said
but creating a numbing procession of meaningless sounds in single file
is not any way to make a living
nor is it any reason to feel so proud
You're pretty good with words
she said But words are only symbols assigned
to define
a feeling They are not
the feeling itself after all
You cannot produce a succession of symbolism in
lieu of the feeling
Especially in your case where you use words
you don't even know the meaning of
to express your love
You're alright with your words
she said
yet you wallow in their definitions
Friday, June 18, 2010
Tenement story.
I wrote an epic poem when I was 22.
It took me five years to complete. It's about the street I lived on in Lexington Kentucky. Five years dwelling on one small city block. Five years spent observing and recording.
It was called "Third Street Tenement" and it was supposed to be published by Sweet Lady Moon Press in 2002. Galleys were printed up, editorial decisions made... But it never saw publication. SLM Press folded before the book ever went to the printers. It was originally written out longhand in pencil, pen, on bar napkins, on typed sheets. it compiled in a slate green folder that grew thicker and denser over the years.
I finished the final edit on my first PC sometime in 2001. Being my first PC, it had @ 10 GB of storage, this was the era of Napster. I constantly deleted files so I could fit one more Jets To Brazil song on my hard drive. I ultimately burned the thing out. The poem was gone. Five years of my life was gone. The epic poem not so jokingly referred to as "Crossley's Leaves Of Grass" slipped into the ether. It was just gone. There were a few bar napkin stanzas left, six hand written pages of the original, and a digital recording of me reading it at the Cincinnati Art Museum(which I didn't have).
It was five years of my life. Five years of my twenties I could never get back. It was arguably the most important piece of my early works. I couldn't recite a single stanza from memory.
I called it a loss. I moved on.
Christopher Eyre is my guardian angel.
I have known the man for ten years now and he has never ceased to swoop in and provide exactly the guidance I need at the right moment. In this memoir I'm writing, I talk about how Christopher and I actually had a long distance conversation through our tags on a bathroom wall in a detox center, always months apart, yet always right on time. Always giving me the hope I needed to get through.
Christopher was the one who woke me up everyday last summer and forced me to get out of bed and register for school. Bringing coffee and doughnuts and standing non-compliant as I attempted to go off and do other things.
He was also waiting outside of the school on my first day to take me for ice cream. Rare breed.
Christopher's parents were moving out of their house, he went home to Cincinnati to go through all of his old things to decide what to throw away, what to keep. Apparently I had been giving him manuscripts and copies of my work for the last ten years, because he came back to Seattle with a heap of it.
All of my lost "works", things I had to write off and move forward from years ago.
He even had a cassette of my old spoken word band The Last Chances and our appearance on NPR.
What I was most surprised to see among these old pieces, was that I've been writing the same story for years.
They are all about me being alone, wanting a girl to stay, before ultimately becoming alienated by the whole situation.
I should have this down by now. I've been scrutinizing it for 10 damned years.
Third Street Tenement was also in the pile. It's a long one, take your time reading it.
This is me at my best all those years ago. This is me saying everything I had to say at the time.
I remember the feeling when I finally pulled that last sheet out of the old Smith Corona typewriter when
I was writing "reprise". I felt winded... Out of breath. Vindicated.
This poem is the epitaph of a young man that finally felt like he said everything he wanted to for once.
At that age, this was the best I could say it.
The thing was, at that time, I felt I had said it.
So...
Third Street Tenement
You Golgotha,
You Ghetto,
you’re killing me, cant you see that?
Havent you yet noticed my horns?
You mad matador
briskly shaking crimson flags in my face,
taunting me with red wealth,
then pulling away...
You jest, I’m through
Fuck you Sugar!
Sing your sweet reprise no more,
You Moloch
You Whore,
you frail marrowed martyr.
What do you think youre dying for this week?
Shorter lines at the food stamp distribution window,
cheaper drinks at happy hour,
free delousing
food
& showers?
What a mockery you have made of our condition,
you shiggity shyster,
you saggedy lackster,
you buster of lustre...
Third Street Tenement
Where your dogs outside are crying,
your children barking,
taxi cabs, no parking...
On the corner, two small boys
are throwing stones at the streetlamps,
like blowing out the sun, shooting out the lights.
On the corner, two old prostitutes
are shooting glances at passing cars,
like blowing out the sun, shooting out the lights.
Eventually a non descript, blue sedan pulls to the corner,
& one of the prostitues walks over to talk to the driver,
he rolls down the window,
bares his teeth like bad intentions
A moment later, one of the small boys from the corner,
climbs into the passenger seat of the sedan,
still holding a few small stones.
Third Street Tenement
Here, on the sidewalk, a boy waits sallow,
trying to hold on to himself, for just ten more minutes,
trying to pull taut, the loose threads that are unraveling him,
...Just ten more minutes...
Until the man comes, to the corner to meet him,
shooting craps & bright orange pills...
Five of them...
Glimmering with a candy cadescence.(one handful of hindrance)
Yes now, pay the nice man son,
twenty, forty, sixty dollars,
twenty, forty, sixty minutes,
He’s been waiting, on that cold skeletal bench,
packed tight in the gauze of this encumbering, plasmatic pain,
that boy thought would never end, as each passing minute
drug an anchor across the watches face.
And the man showed late, but luck y for the boy that he showed at all,
now he can go home, go home & shine.
Shine like a kitchen match,
for one quick moment,
And he will survive,
until tommorrow,
when the same scene will reenact itself...
And the boy will awaken into his own sweet sweat,
gasping!
Third Street Tenement
Did you pay your rent to the bar (again)?
I cant stand the scrutiny of it’s sugar, the bitter sting in it’s salt,
it’s dry humor dehydrates -just chips off & blows away
like an ad for HEAVY RACE HORSE OATS,
once painted on the tin siding, now fading,
in retrospect.
I cant stand the thaldrom, I’m stuck in this menagerie,
it’s mothers milk, is menengitis.
And it’s worse than an old whore, in that it doesnt look good,
when the lights are low,
And everybodies drunk.
It dilapidates, a brown bricked bastard,
biding out it’s time on the ebb of downtowns populace,
What did you think? You sorry old street? That you were metropolis?
Your old bones are blown
out, you look as absurd as an old organ grinder, with
your silly little monkey, pissing on your own damned shoes.
Third Street Tenement
Fourth Street, the gutters are full of discarded mar,
the rain beads down her face,
And her mascara makes a clown there,
pinches her ass, & makes her a joke
standing outside that old Third Street bar
waiting for a car,
which never came,
left her only wet, in the breaking light of day.
It started raining, she started walking,
when she heard the pigeons talking,
making jokes of her dismay.
Babies come a long, long way.
Pulls a Virginia Slim from her pocket book,
& strikes a dampened match.
The streetlights go out & leave her in the gray
a damp dawn so far from reckoning.
so voluptous it’s pain,
her hair now marred, now matting in the rain,
cursing over her shoulder,
the car that never came...
Third Street on down to Broadway,
past the lipid parks
and pawn shop lots
through the broken panes of the old liquor store.
littered with lotto numbers,
proven losers, gone lunatic with
the politic of random.
it’s need stopped a dollar short,
exits hock
with a dollar more...
You harvest, you cold old farmer,
the luck of the louse, dandelions, dismay,
I remember once in April, how
you glued me in your mud, held me in your
muck. In which I got stuck, through brown bottled days,
And everyone whose walked you,
whose slipped heels in your cement,
has wished they’d walked
another way.
Third Street, thirsty for it’s crops,
lines it’s houses in crooked rows,
Third Streets, sowed it’s wild oats,
and now looms above
& watches them grow.
You crooked old farmer,
wondering how your flowers grow delinquent,
when you planted them so,
-Oh sickly blue, Chrysanthemum
it was poverty which nurtured you
so.
Third Street Tenement
I stood sideburnt, & slim
on this run down old street, one scuffed shoe
tapping to an inaudible beat.
I hold up my head to notice a Third Street whore
talking to me....She asks,
“How you ever gonna beat them blues, in your thrift store suit
and your prison tattoos? How you ever gonna beat the gloom
of the Catalina Motel?”
Me, I just started walking,
tipping back a brown bag full of fire,
thinkin’ how is that whore ever gonna meet her
desire, or her need ?
But she met up with an old man in the bar,
she drove far away in a Cadillac car
to Shangri-La
La-de-da
La-de-da...
Third Street Tenement
I need to know release, I need to know
warmth that is not mechanical.
I reside in it’s alleys,
& I sleep in it’s rooms,
I hide in it’s shadows
& I dig through it’s garbage cans.
I feel it’s rain,
& it leaves oily residue on my skin,
it makes me out a vagrant
when I am not.
It proves me a liar
before I can speak.
Surely it wasnt me, who hung the shoes over it’s telephone wires,
or sung the low baritone whistle
of it’s evening train.
surely it wasnt me,
who traced my initials in it’s sidewalk,
back before it’s pavement dried,
I need warmth that isnt administered by machines,
or adjusted by dials.
I need my sleep to come easy,
I need this street to release me.
Third Street Tenement
How many months?
How many times?
How many poets have exploded in your green walled rooms,
awaiting food or commission?
How many poets have you yet devoured in the name of a god
whose only mocked by beleivers?
How many crotches have shuddered in the dark,
trying to yeild from your sweet & low thrust?
This pelvis which gyrates & stinks of incestuous lech.
Dyslexia,
blech!
How many babies have you fathered stillborn?
How many girls have you turned into mothers,
how many food stamps stolen, How many WIC vouchers vexed?
How many substance sniffers have you welcomed
into the cold confines of your green walls?
How many children have you stolen between your old
sticky sheets, to leave choking on the
cherries of your sperm?
Third Street Tenement
There are weeds in the garden
And no bird stops to perch.
Preferring instead to fly right past.
Here no dove flies,
no eagle would dare, where the minotaur
walks among the children.
Where corrugated iron may adorn each daisy.
Remnants of our neighborhood
now reduced to crack ashes & rogue
and scarlet...
Scarlet is the whole of your alphabet now,
Trick Dixie,
you mustve committed some lurid sin,
for now even the grass refuses to grow betwixt
the cracks in your sad sidewalks...
Third Street Tenement
And this was writ,
awaking past noon,
to the smell of fruit,
gone rotten too soon.....
(REPRISE)
(& it was said, that one day, a young man would rise up, & sing the sad gospels of this forsaken street, whose history has been cast in shade, & whose potentates have been made to appear nude, & ashamed before the eyes of God, only to reccite their sins in the crude form of a poem)
Your Moloch,
was a whore
so sing your sad refrains no more,
youre noones hero anymore,
& heroes are only sought by the inadequate.
Your place of a skull,
your Golgotha, sweetheart,
is nothing more than a grafitti strewn ghetto,
a condemned commisary,
supplying residency
for sad luck ankle biters, guilty of raping angels
at the sad age of eleven,
now smoking that crack
by the railroad track
& finding squalor, a most neccesary
staple.
Third Street Tenement
And is it time to pay the rent again?
Already?
I’ve got to get my money back from
the bartenders,
Christ, I’ve got to be drunk to live here
so isnt rent already paid in ways
not legally tendered
when the mold carpets the walls,
& covers my cats with a dull green fur.
And a fat Third St. flea
hops off the rim of my coffee cup
into the dismal loins of the sofa
Third Street’s getting old,
as I am told by these brown bricked bestiaries,
as was whispered to me from this quick cancer,
I am to understand
from the old razors I find in the gutter
that hope dont live around here no more.
And even them ‘ol razors
are too dull to cut to the quick
& end this all quickly.
No,
nothing ever sang a sadder blue
than that old brown razor
who lives on a cinder block,
Third St. & Jefferson crossing
Under streetlamps in the spring,
goat footed girls in gingham dresses
drink warm beer from aluminum cans
They piroutte quickly from one pole to the next
spinning & giddy
& wholeheartedly drunk.
Under streetlamps in the spring,
giddy footed girls
in light & flowing dresses
stumble drunkenly down the street.
Their voices carry & echo
through the tenements.
A curse to that boy who broke her heart,
A curse to that girl who thinks she’s smart,
Their tone grows careless
& louder as it approaches
Their giggles grace the walls
& resonate among the ivy.
Under streetlamps in the spring
bear witness to these wonderous things.
Third Street Tenement
She hugs the stool, crouched down like a leopard
& ready to pounce, I see her down there,
smoking & seething with a curious reproach.
I finish my reading & take my stool
next to her, she twists around, more like a jackal this time,
She blows a tendril of smoke over her left shoulder,
half of it catches my eye.
“So, I’m Charles Bukowski’s daughter”
she says to me.
“Really” I reply, “thats nice, I’m my mothers son.”
She sits up in her stool, now erect & slightly rocking
maybe she’s a cobra this time, she looks intent
& stares hard at me
“and whose your mother?”
she asks, fishing around for a new name to
drop, a different claim to the same old fame.
“Ah, noone youd know”
I tell her
“Anyone can get knocked up...”
She wilts at that, not even like an animal at all,
but more like a delicate flower that folds when the
sun finally sinks back into the earth,
She mashes out her cigarette,
& leaves it still smoldering in the tray
as she moves five stools down the bar
in front of the stage where someone else is now reading.
& crouching down on her stool like a leopard
she watches...
Third Street Tenement
Awake & I woke
to the sound of screaming.
To the sound of someone dying inside of a little room
the sound of his nails
scratching on the drywall, the sound of his gasping
swimming frantic for breath.
I hear his wheezing through the thin wall,
his head knocking against it dully.
Then a gunshot...Another?
paint chips drip from my ceiling & onto
my mattress, a door slams on the other side of the wall
& I hear the scuffle of feet, running.
I can feel the sound of breath
as it seeps thru the hole in his chest.
A frantic palpitation.
I hold my ear to the drywall
until Im certain he’s dead in there.
I hold my ear to the wall
I pray for sound.
Third Street Tenement
There is soot on her skin
in these old pictures I have of her
& it’s alright I guess, a frozen moment
from better days, when smiles were meant
& two bare needs found each other in the dark...
It’s all I know
I look at the picture of her
& her curious smile(all teeth)
yet all I can see
is this soot on her skin, from someones drunken cigarette.
& I say Girl, I know that youre covered
with soot, & tiny little hairs
& things called folicles, which
hardly sound like things that belong on a girl.
And I know girls fart
& puke also, but damn
it’s almost sacrilege
this soot on your skin
where Third Street tattooed you too
with that bad Midas touch
that turns everything back to paperclips.
Third Street Tenement
The other day while walking down Second
I found a syringe in the grass
& I knew you had been there Third Street
violating your boundary again
luring the children to suck
on your sour candy,
Taking the shit straight from one artists ass
& stuffing it into the mouth of the next
I cant understand why were stuck in theses streets
that are pert & fallow with a curious disease
The constant drip of the faucet
becomes so loud that the rats chew each others eyes out
Fat with syphilis you sit behind the balustrade
conducting a torrid symphony
with your vestial tail, & eyes yellow with hepatitus
rocking your head back & forth
to the tune of the awful calliope that
echoes down your streets.
It’s July, It’s hot water, merry making time
I wake hung over into the humidity
The hot faucet is the only one that works
I run the scalding water over my face,
In this condition, I realize that it’s
alive, its seething & thriving in this
sweat, & those arent oil slicks
at all out on the sidewalks
“Mister that aint oil it’s blood”
This oil annoints the heads of angels
without wings to prove them.
Blood from the stigmata of a Christ
without a cross to restrain him.
Blood from a gaping wound called love
without a little red colored heart to symbolize it.
Third Street, you drain all
color in your inequity
leaving only black & white
to dabble there
praying for grey
Third Street, you fink
then you would be God
without your only begotten son
to prove you.
I picked up the syringe I had found in your lot
Third Street
& as I held it, it cried out
“Ha-Ha I’m a Fang boy, & you
would advertise for me....”
“No” I screamed “Somebody gimme a bottle
of something! Anything!”
Then someone did give me
a bottle
& the syringe & I sat down
together & got quite drunk
he was a crazy little bastard, but he had
his special sad & reflective moments
he didnt have a place to stay at the time
so I let him sleep on my sofa
Most night we went out,
we’d always get very drunk
never laid
One particular night, when the booze had hit him heavy
& he was in one of his usual self pity moods
he leveled with me
“Mike, were both gettin’ old man, but you’ve got
hope, you’ll be good for somethin’
I mean man
Imma syringe, & nothing’s worse than an old dirty rig
I mean, you know...
I’m just doomed man, see, look here.”
& he showed me the lettering
down near the bottom
where it said “USE ONCE AND DESTROY”
in bold black letters
I came home one night about a week later,
i had actually left before the bars closed
because I had something I wanted to show him,
something his peculiar humor could really
appreciate. But when I pulled him out
of his box, he was dead
& apparently he went pretty painfully
Third Street Tenement
It’s that narcoleptic solitude of your
streetlights
it’s that old Marlon Brando charm that
always lured them here
to stand beneath your
milk white lights
that makes their skin look horribly translucent
like a premature skeleton poking through
the parchment of their skin.
Like skulls & bones hanging from
poles,Dios de los Muerte
And one white cigarette butt
dangling from their yellowing teeth.
Acheiving a coffin cool, a derelict
obsession with death, fixated on expiration
they put their absurdities on parade.
Now all of your tenants know
the difference between daydream
& nightmare is purely
narcotic.
Third Street Tenement
As the children skip & the children scream
sing silly songs as they burn holes through
their retinas from staring at your sun,
Thirds Street, your children steal
their fathers dope from between the mattress
while you hold their arena with a cold indifference,
& none of these children want to grow
up to be the president anymore...
Their gonna steal their fathers pistol
take it down to the pawn shop
trade it in for a big red guitar
theyre gonna be big red rock stars
& get all their downs for free.
Third Street, She’s out tonight, & she’s sheer seduction,
I lie awake & alone on
the mattress in the corner, staring at the ceiling
& choking on smoke.
Outside in the neons, many young men
are becoming mosquitos
for their women
they unzip flies to
see what hides inside
they undo bras without a
mere fumble on the latch.
These pretty boys dip their fingers in the honeypot
anxious for the silken prize,the musk of sex
tinged with cigaretes, they pass the cotton of her panties.
They are taking each other apart with each
piece of apparel
“Hey whats this? is this for me?”
all they desire is the whipping cream
of self satisfaction
They leave their honey pots
shattered on dawns mattress, splayed open
at the hips, in sugar boys repose
& I thank the same damned god
that you do, baby,
that their cum
washes out easier than
your blood.
Third Street Tenement
Oh Baby, Where am I now
that mania knows my name?
I am the long gone song of the terminally rotten
I am the glassy eyed gaze of the easily forgotten,
Luck is no lady,
at least no lady proper, she whistles past the tenement men
always a ruffle of her skirt,
always a tease, of what might have been the breeze,
more likely her five slim fingers, pulling up the hem,
pouty lips & her cursed panties,
A petty peek at pathos.
But she dont stop, she just keeps walkin’
leaving them drooling in her wake.
& I am dumb to tell them
that she wont stop so soon.
& I am dumb to tell them
that she has other, more pressing
engagements.
Luck is no lady, at least no lady
proper.
Who goes a courting out past the railroad tracks
who goes walking at night with a random aire,
& when she gets them alone she lays them down
kisses the coarseness of their unshaven necks,
Try as they might, they grind against her with all
the dry steam of a locomotive,
try as they might, Luck, suddenly chaste
leaves them there on the soft blanket of earth.
Suddenly fooled, &
whole heartedly
blue.
Third Street Tenement
One evening while walking home
from the bar
I was suddenly accosted in the same lot
where I had met the syringe.
Out of the shadows I was approached
by this haggard, skinny, rickety, old
contraption, which hardly
resembled a man, yet as it clanked
& snorted forward from the shadow
I saw it had a mouth,
“Hey you...” It snarled “Gimme a cigarette!”
It walked out into the floodlight, I saw
by the small slits of its eyes & the almond tone
of it’s skin, that it was vaguely Asian,
or perhaps Mongol. I, being weary
of confrontation with anything so sickening
to the touch, gave it a cigarette.
It had a bright orane number 3
painted on it’s forehead,
& it teetered there under the streetlight
like some arcane taoist,who concluded
the meaning of life was nothing more than
grain alcohol.
It was nude, save for a pair of old loafers,
& a blue bath towel swaddled around its waist.
“You are nothing!” it screeched, after I gave it a light
“Yeah, who are you?” I asked
“I am the Left Handed Taoist, I make my own shit, & I eat it too.
But you, Ha! You ARE nothing
I make my own shit
& I eat it too...”
“Okay,” I agreed, “but, what’s that
orange 3 for though, on your forehead?”
“Trinity,” he said
“Consume,
Expel,
Flush....”
Third Street Tenement
It took me five years to complete. It's about the street I lived on in Lexington Kentucky. Five years dwelling on one small city block. Five years spent observing and recording.
It was called "Third Street Tenement" and it was supposed to be published by Sweet Lady Moon Press in 2002. Galleys were printed up, editorial decisions made... But it never saw publication. SLM Press folded before the book ever went to the printers. It was originally written out longhand in pencil, pen, on bar napkins, on typed sheets. it compiled in a slate green folder that grew thicker and denser over the years.
I finished the final edit on my first PC sometime in 2001. Being my first PC, it had @ 10 GB of storage, this was the era of Napster. I constantly deleted files so I could fit one more Jets To Brazil song on my hard drive. I ultimately burned the thing out. The poem was gone. Five years of my life was gone. The epic poem not so jokingly referred to as "Crossley's Leaves Of Grass" slipped into the ether. It was just gone. There were a few bar napkin stanzas left, six hand written pages of the original, and a digital recording of me reading it at the Cincinnati Art Museum(which I didn't have).
It was five years of my life. Five years of my twenties I could never get back. It was arguably the most important piece of my early works. I couldn't recite a single stanza from memory.
I called it a loss. I moved on.
Christopher Eyre is my guardian angel.
I have known the man for ten years now and he has never ceased to swoop in and provide exactly the guidance I need at the right moment. In this memoir I'm writing, I talk about how Christopher and I actually had a long distance conversation through our tags on a bathroom wall in a detox center, always months apart, yet always right on time. Always giving me the hope I needed to get through.
Christopher was the one who woke me up everyday last summer and forced me to get out of bed and register for school. Bringing coffee and doughnuts and standing non-compliant as I attempted to go off and do other things.
He was also waiting outside of the school on my first day to take me for ice cream. Rare breed.
Christopher's parents were moving out of their house, he went home to Cincinnati to go through all of his old things to decide what to throw away, what to keep. Apparently I had been giving him manuscripts and copies of my work for the last ten years, because he came back to Seattle with a heap of it.
All of my lost "works", things I had to write off and move forward from years ago.
He even had a cassette of my old spoken word band The Last Chances and our appearance on NPR.
What I was most surprised to see among these old pieces, was that I've been writing the same story for years.
They are all about me being alone, wanting a girl to stay, before ultimately becoming alienated by the whole situation.
I should have this down by now. I've been scrutinizing it for 10 damned years.
Third Street Tenement was also in the pile. It's a long one, take your time reading it.
This is me at my best all those years ago. This is me saying everything I had to say at the time.
I remember the feeling when I finally pulled that last sheet out of the old Smith Corona typewriter when
I was writing "reprise". I felt winded... Out of breath. Vindicated.
This poem is the epitaph of a young man that finally felt like he said everything he wanted to for once.
At that age, this was the best I could say it.
The thing was, at that time, I felt I had said it.
So...
Third Street Tenement
You Golgotha,
You Ghetto,
you’re killing me, cant you see that?
Havent you yet noticed my horns?
You mad matador
briskly shaking crimson flags in my face,
taunting me with red wealth,
then pulling away...
You jest, I’m through
Fuck you Sugar!
Sing your sweet reprise no more,
You Moloch
You Whore,
you frail marrowed martyr.
What do you think youre dying for this week?
Shorter lines at the food stamp distribution window,
cheaper drinks at happy hour,
free delousing
food
& showers?
What a mockery you have made of our condition,
you shiggity shyster,
you saggedy lackster,
you buster of lustre...
Third Street Tenement
Where your dogs outside are crying,
your children barking,
taxi cabs, no parking...
On the corner, two small boys
are throwing stones at the streetlamps,
like blowing out the sun, shooting out the lights.
On the corner, two old prostitutes
are shooting glances at passing cars,
like blowing out the sun, shooting out the lights.
Eventually a non descript, blue sedan pulls to the corner,
& one of the prostitues walks over to talk to the driver,
he rolls down the window,
bares his teeth like bad intentions
A moment later, one of the small boys from the corner,
climbs into the passenger seat of the sedan,
still holding a few small stones.
Third Street Tenement
Here, on the sidewalk, a boy waits sallow,
trying to hold on to himself, for just ten more minutes,
trying to pull taut, the loose threads that are unraveling him,
...Just ten more minutes...
Until the man comes, to the corner to meet him,
shooting craps & bright orange pills...
Five of them...
Glimmering with a candy cadescence.(one handful of hindrance)
Yes now, pay the nice man son,
twenty, forty, sixty dollars,
twenty, forty, sixty minutes,
He’s been waiting, on that cold skeletal bench,
packed tight in the gauze of this encumbering, plasmatic pain,
that boy thought would never end, as each passing minute
drug an anchor across the watches face.
And the man showed late, but luck y for the boy that he showed at all,
now he can go home, go home & shine.
Shine like a kitchen match,
for one quick moment,
And he will survive,
until tommorrow,
when the same scene will reenact itself...
And the boy will awaken into his own sweet sweat,
gasping!
Third Street Tenement
Did you pay your rent to the bar (again)?
I cant stand the scrutiny of it’s sugar, the bitter sting in it’s salt,
it’s dry humor dehydrates -just chips off & blows away
like an ad for HEAVY RACE HORSE OATS,
once painted on the tin siding, now fading,
in retrospect.
I cant stand the thaldrom, I’m stuck in this menagerie,
it’s mothers milk, is menengitis.
And it’s worse than an old whore, in that it doesnt look good,
when the lights are low,
And everybodies drunk.
It dilapidates, a brown bricked bastard,
biding out it’s time on the ebb of downtowns populace,
What did you think? You sorry old street? That you were metropolis?
Your old bones are blown
out, you look as absurd as an old organ grinder, with
your silly little monkey, pissing on your own damned shoes.
Third Street Tenement
Fourth Street, the gutters are full of discarded mar,
the rain beads down her face,
And her mascara makes a clown there,
pinches her ass, & makes her a joke
standing outside that old Third Street bar
waiting for a car,
which never came,
left her only wet, in the breaking light of day.
It started raining, she started walking,
when she heard the pigeons talking,
making jokes of her dismay.
Babies come a long, long way.
Pulls a Virginia Slim from her pocket book,
& strikes a dampened match.
The streetlights go out & leave her in the gray
a damp dawn so far from reckoning.
so voluptous it’s pain,
her hair now marred, now matting in the rain,
cursing over her shoulder,
the car that never came...
Third Street on down to Broadway,
past the lipid parks
and pawn shop lots
through the broken panes of the old liquor store.
littered with lotto numbers,
proven losers, gone lunatic with
the politic of random.
it’s need stopped a dollar short,
exits hock
with a dollar more...
You harvest, you cold old farmer,
the luck of the louse, dandelions, dismay,
I remember once in April, how
you glued me in your mud, held me in your
muck. In which I got stuck, through brown bottled days,
And everyone whose walked you,
whose slipped heels in your cement,
has wished they’d walked
another way.
Third Street, thirsty for it’s crops,
lines it’s houses in crooked rows,
Third Streets, sowed it’s wild oats,
and now looms above
& watches them grow.
You crooked old farmer,
wondering how your flowers grow delinquent,
when you planted them so,
-Oh sickly blue, Chrysanthemum
it was poverty which nurtured you
so.
Third Street Tenement
I stood sideburnt, & slim
on this run down old street, one scuffed shoe
tapping to an inaudible beat.
I hold up my head to notice a Third Street whore
talking to me....She asks,
“How you ever gonna beat them blues, in your thrift store suit
and your prison tattoos? How you ever gonna beat the gloom
of the Catalina Motel?”
Me, I just started walking,
tipping back a brown bag full of fire,
thinkin’ how is that whore ever gonna meet her
desire, or her need ?
But she met up with an old man in the bar,
she drove far away in a Cadillac car
to Shangri-La
La-de-da
La-de-da...
Third Street Tenement
I need to know release, I need to know
warmth that is not mechanical.
I reside in it’s alleys,
& I sleep in it’s rooms,
I hide in it’s shadows
& I dig through it’s garbage cans.
I feel it’s rain,
& it leaves oily residue on my skin,
it makes me out a vagrant
when I am not.
It proves me a liar
before I can speak.
Surely it wasnt me, who hung the shoes over it’s telephone wires,
or sung the low baritone whistle
of it’s evening train.
surely it wasnt me,
who traced my initials in it’s sidewalk,
back before it’s pavement dried,
I need warmth that isnt administered by machines,
or adjusted by dials.
I need my sleep to come easy,
I need this street to release me.
Third Street Tenement
How many months?
How many times?
How many poets have exploded in your green walled rooms,
awaiting food or commission?
How many poets have you yet devoured in the name of a god
whose only mocked by beleivers?
How many crotches have shuddered in the dark,
trying to yeild from your sweet & low thrust?
This pelvis which gyrates & stinks of incestuous lech.
Dyslexia,
blech!
How many babies have you fathered stillborn?
How many girls have you turned into mothers,
how many food stamps stolen, How many WIC vouchers vexed?
How many substance sniffers have you welcomed
into the cold confines of your green walls?
How many children have you stolen between your old
sticky sheets, to leave choking on the
cherries of your sperm?
Third Street Tenement
There are weeds in the garden
And no bird stops to perch.
Preferring instead to fly right past.
Here no dove flies,
no eagle would dare, where the minotaur
walks among the children.
Where corrugated iron may adorn each daisy.
Remnants of our neighborhood
now reduced to crack ashes & rogue
and scarlet...
Scarlet is the whole of your alphabet now,
Trick Dixie,
you mustve committed some lurid sin,
for now even the grass refuses to grow betwixt
the cracks in your sad sidewalks...
Third Street Tenement
And this was writ,
awaking past noon,
to the smell of fruit,
gone rotten too soon.....
(REPRISE)
(& it was said, that one day, a young man would rise up, & sing the sad gospels of this forsaken street, whose history has been cast in shade, & whose potentates have been made to appear nude, & ashamed before the eyes of God, only to reccite their sins in the crude form of a poem)
Your Moloch,
was a whore
so sing your sad refrains no more,
youre noones hero anymore,
& heroes are only sought by the inadequate.
Your place of a skull,
your Golgotha, sweetheart,
is nothing more than a grafitti strewn ghetto,
a condemned commisary,
supplying residency
for sad luck ankle biters, guilty of raping angels
at the sad age of eleven,
now smoking that crack
by the railroad track
& finding squalor, a most neccesary
staple.
Third Street Tenement
And is it time to pay the rent again?
Already?
I’ve got to get my money back from
the bartenders,
Christ, I’ve got to be drunk to live here
so isnt rent already paid in ways
not legally tendered
when the mold carpets the walls,
& covers my cats with a dull green fur.
And a fat Third St. flea
hops off the rim of my coffee cup
into the dismal loins of the sofa
Third Street’s getting old,
as I am told by these brown bricked bestiaries,
as was whispered to me from this quick cancer,
I am to understand
from the old razors I find in the gutter
that hope dont live around here no more.
And even them ‘ol razors
are too dull to cut to the quick
& end this all quickly.
No,
nothing ever sang a sadder blue
than that old brown razor
who lives on a cinder block,
Third St. & Jefferson crossing
Under streetlamps in the spring,
goat footed girls in gingham dresses
drink warm beer from aluminum cans
They piroutte quickly from one pole to the next
spinning & giddy
& wholeheartedly drunk.
Under streetlamps in the spring,
giddy footed girls
in light & flowing dresses
stumble drunkenly down the street.
Their voices carry & echo
through the tenements.
A curse to that boy who broke her heart,
A curse to that girl who thinks she’s smart,
Their tone grows careless
& louder as it approaches
Their giggles grace the walls
& resonate among the ivy.
Under streetlamps in the spring
bear witness to these wonderous things.
Third Street Tenement
She hugs the stool, crouched down like a leopard
& ready to pounce, I see her down there,
smoking & seething with a curious reproach.
I finish my reading & take my stool
next to her, she twists around, more like a jackal this time,
She blows a tendril of smoke over her left shoulder,
half of it catches my eye.
“So, I’m Charles Bukowski’s daughter”
she says to me.
“Really” I reply, “thats nice, I’m my mothers son.”
She sits up in her stool, now erect & slightly rocking
maybe she’s a cobra this time, she looks intent
& stares hard at me
“and whose your mother?”
she asks, fishing around for a new name to
drop, a different claim to the same old fame.
“Ah, noone youd know”
I tell her
“Anyone can get knocked up...”
She wilts at that, not even like an animal at all,
but more like a delicate flower that folds when the
sun finally sinks back into the earth,
She mashes out her cigarette,
& leaves it still smoldering in the tray
as she moves five stools down the bar
in front of the stage where someone else is now reading.
& crouching down on her stool like a leopard
she watches...
Third Street Tenement
Awake & I woke
to the sound of screaming.
To the sound of someone dying inside of a little room
the sound of his nails
scratching on the drywall, the sound of his gasping
swimming frantic for breath.
I hear his wheezing through the thin wall,
his head knocking against it dully.
Then a gunshot...Another?
paint chips drip from my ceiling & onto
my mattress, a door slams on the other side of the wall
& I hear the scuffle of feet, running.
I can feel the sound of breath
as it seeps thru the hole in his chest.
A frantic palpitation.
I hold my ear to the drywall
until Im certain he’s dead in there.
I hold my ear to the wall
I pray for sound.
Third Street Tenement
There is soot on her skin
in these old pictures I have of her
& it’s alright I guess, a frozen moment
from better days, when smiles were meant
& two bare needs found each other in the dark...
It’s all I know
I look at the picture of her
& her curious smile(all teeth)
yet all I can see
is this soot on her skin, from someones drunken cigarette.
& I say Girl, I know that youre covered
with soot, & tiny little hairs
& things called folicles, which
hardly sound like things that belong on a girl.
And I know girls fart
& puke also, but damn
it’s almost sacrilege
this soot on your skin
where Third Street tattooed you too
with that bad Midas touch
that turns everything back to paperclips.
Third Street Tenement
The other day while walking down Second
I found a syringe in the grass
& I knew you had been there Third Street
violating your boundary again
luring the children to suck
on your sour candy,
Taking the shit straight from one artists ass
& stuffing it into the mouth of the next
I cant understand why were stuck in theses streets
that are pert & fallow with a curious disease
The constant drip of the faucet
becomes so loud that the rats chew each others eyes out
Fat with syphilis you sit behind the balustrade
conducting a torrid symphony
with your vestial tail, & eyes yellow with hepatitus
rocking your head back & forth
to the tune of the awful calliope that
echoes down your streets.
It’s July, It’s hot water, merry making time
I wake hung over into the humidity
The hot faucet is the only one that works
I run the scalding water over my face,
In this condition, I realize that it’s
alive, its seething & thriving in this
sweat, & those arent oil slicks
at all out on the sidewalks
“Mister that aint oil it’s blood”
This oil annoints the heads of angels
without wings to prove them.
Blood from the stigmata of a Christ
without a cross to restrain him.
Blood from a gaping wound called love
without a little red colored heart to symbolize it.
Third Street, you drain all
color in your inequity
leaving only black & white
to dabble there
praying for grey
Third Street, you fink
then you would be God
without your only begotten son
to prove you.
I picked up the syringe I had found in your lot
Third Street
& as I held it, it cried out
“Ha-Ha I’m a Fang boy, & you
would advertise for me....”
“No” I screamed “Somebody gimme a bottle
of something! Anything!”
Then someone did give me
a bottle
& the syringe & I sat down
together & got quite drunk
he was a crazy little bastard, but he had
his special sad & reflective moments
he didnt have a place to stay at the time
so I let him sleep on my sofa
Most night we went out,
we’d always get very drunk
never laid
One particular night, when the booze had hit him heavy
& he was in one of his usual self pity moods
he leveled with me
“Mike, were both gettin’ old man, but you’ve got
hope, you’ll be good for somethin’
I mean man
Imma syringe, & nothing’s worse than an old dirty rig
I mean, you know...
I’m just doomed man, see, look here.”
& he showed me the lettering
down near the bottom
where it said “USE ONCE AND DESTROY”
in bold black letters
I came home one night about a week later,
i had actually left before the bars closed
because I had something I wanted to show him,
something his peculiar humor could really
appreciate. But when I pulled him out
of his box, he was dead
& apparently he went pretty painfully
Third Street Tenement
It’s that narcoleptic solitude of your
streetlights
it’s that old Marlon Brando charm that
always lured them here
to stand beneath your
milk white lights
that makes their skin look horribly translucent
like a premature skeleton poking through
the parchment of their skin.
Like skulls & bones hanging from
poles,Dios de los Muerte
And one white cigarette butt
dangling from their yellowing teeth.
Acheiving a coffin cool, a derelict
obsession with death, fixated on expiration
they put their absurdities on parade.
Now all of your tenants know
the difference between daydream
& nightmare is purely
narcotic.
Third Street Tenement
As the children skip & the children scream
sing silly songs as they burn holes through
their retinas from staring at your sun,
Thirds Street, your children steal
their fathers dope from between the mattress
while you hold their arena with a cold indifference,
& none of these children want to grow
up to be the president anymore...
Their gonna steal their fathers pistol
take it down to the pawn shop
trade it in for a big red guitar
theyre gonna be big red rock stars
& get all their downs for free.
Third Street, She’s out tonight, & she’s sheer seduction,
I lie awake & alone on
the mattress in the corner, staring at the ceiling
& choking on smoke.
Outside in the neons, many young men
are becoming mosquitos
for their women
they unzip flies to
see what hides inside
they undo bras without a
mere fumble on the latch.
These pretty boys dip their fingers in the honeypot
anxious for the silken prize,the musk of sex
tinged with cigaretes, they pass the cotton of her panties.
They are taking each other apart with each
piece of apparel
“Hey whats this? is this for me?”
all they desire is the whipping cream
of self satisfaction
They leave their honey pots
shattered on dawns mattress, splayed open
at the hips, in sugar boys repose
& I thank the same damned god
that you do, baby,
that their cum
washes out easier than
your blood.
Third Street Tenement
Oh Baby, Where am I now
that mania knows my name?
I am the long gone song of the terminally rotten
I am the glassy eyed gaze of the easily forgotten,
Luck is no lady,
at least no lady proper, she whistles past the tenement men
always a ruffle of her skirt,
always a tease, of what might have been the breeze,
more likely her five slim fingers, pulling up the hem,
pouty lips & her cursed panties,
A petty peek at pathos.
But she dont stop, she just keeps walkin’
leaving them drooling in her wake.
& I am dumb to tell them
that she wont stop so soon.
& I am dumb to tell them
that she has other, more pressing
engagements.
Luck is no lady, at least no lady
proper.
Who goes a courting out past the railroad tracks
who goes walking at night with a random aire,
& when she gets them alone she lays them down
kisses the coarseness of their unshaven necks,
Try as they might, they grind against her with all
the dry steam of a locomotive,
try as they might, Luck, suddenly chaste
leaves them there on the soft blanket of earth.
Suddenly fooled, &
whole heartedly
blue.
Third Street Tenement
One evening while walking home
from the bar
I was suddenly accosted in the same lot
where I had met the syringe.
Out of the shadows I was approached
by this haggard, skinny, rickety, old
contraption, which hardly
resembled a man, yet as it clanked
& snorted forward from the shadow
I saw it had a mouth,
“Hey you...” It snarled “Gimme a cigarette!”
It walked out into the floodlight, I saw
by the small slits of its eyes & the almond tone
of it’s skin, that it was vaguely Asian,
or perhaps Mongol. I, being weary
of confrontation with anything so sickening
to the touch, gave it a cigarette.
It had a bright orane number 3
painted on it’s forehead,
& it teetered there under the streetlight
like some arcane taoist,who concluded
the meaning of life was nothing more than
grain alcohol.
It was nude, save for a pair of old loafers,
& a blue bath towel swaddled around its waist.
“You are nothing!” it screeched, after I gave it a light
“Yeah, who are you?” I asked
“I am the Left Handed Taoist, I make my own shit, & I eat it too.
But you, Ha! You ARE nothing
I make my own shit
& I eat it too...”
“Okay,” I agreed, “but, what’s that
orange 3 for though, on your forehead?”
“Trinity,” he said
“Consume,
Expel,
Flush....”
Third Street Tenement
Thursday, June 3, 2010
New old one
I wrote this a few months back. I wanted to post something because I'm going to be busy for the next few days & I like to put at least one entry in each week. It elaborates somewhat on what I started explaining at the end of Psychic Warfare about the suffering inherent in writers. The girl I mention is no longer around, and that's the only part that makes me hesitate about posting this.
I'll apologize in advance then.
I call her "Miss Go Lightly" only because her name is Holly, she doesn't remind me of Audrey Hepburn's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Quite the opposite actually.
Holly is uncomfortable around people, that's one of the things I like so much about her. She gives me one of those slight smiles where only the ends of the lips curl up
at my name dropping, her eyes dip downward from my gaze.
We're both agitated in the company of strangers unless we've been drinking, that was one of the qualities about me she found initially compelling.
As John Berryman stood on the cold concrete of the Washington Ave. bridge, looking at a gun metal gray Minnesota sky, I wonder if he jumped because he thought he had lost "it". it being that intangible thing that writers posses to help them write, and most are constantly in a state of panic about losing.
I wonder if John Berryman figured his last verse his best, and wondered if he could ever produce another one better. Or maybe he had the feeling that he needed to stop now, before he became a caricature of himself.
I suppose he could have been more calculating than that. I imagine he had to know that by jumping from that bridge on that dim winter afternoon, he would be forever etching his name onto the pantheon of accomplished writers.
It's 12:30 am on a Tuesday night, I'm walking slowly down the beer aisle of a grocery store. I'm not shopping, I'm buying. I know exactly what I want, the Pabst Blue Ribbon at the end of the aisle. I always walk slowly down the beer aisle, imagining the good times and great conversations possible in every bottle down the row. The multi-colored labels reflecting off of the light is like a carnival for the
Crossley-02
subconscious. The different tones and moods, all marketed to; the starkness of Session, somberness of Guinness, the impossible standards of Miller High Life. and finally, at the end, the Sesame Street of liquid patriotism, brought to you by the letters P, B, & R. A vision in red, white, & blue.
I grab my pack and make to exit, giving wide berth to a young man in a baseball cap and Tevas hoisting a case of Natural Light. He looks intoxicated already, and sways like he want's me to run into him. I have no less than 3 weapons on my person, I'm not worried about an altercation. I'm worried if he has an "it", and if he's afraid he might someday lose it.
Vachel Lindsay was the heir apparent to William Butler Yeats. His verse literally sang across the page with such meter and rhythm it's impossible not to chant it out in your head. "Mumbo Jumbo will hoodoo you" he wrote in The Congo. Not yet knowing that his own mumbo jumbo was going to shortly hoodoo him. He drank a bottle of Lysol when he thought he had lost it.
The wandering poet having made his final stop in the bathroom of his little house, and leaving his final stanza for his wife to find blue faced on the floor.
I met Holly at a friends party. This is over a year ago now. We would see each other at parties and talk alone outside about films and books for hours, chain-smoking and gulping down keg beer. I felt like I had known her for months before she finally gave me her phone number, telling me not to use it. She said she didn't like talking on the phone, I believed her without question. Neither of us has ever said that we need to take it slow, it is just something that we have done. On the rare occasion that I see her more than once a week, I fear that I might be smothering her.
Crossley-03
The darkness people mention that is supposedly inherent in writers, seems to hold it's own arcane appeal. One gets the idea that when darkness is mentioned in this context, it is the same way Victorian era Europeans used to describe Africa as the Dark Continent. Or what Bruce Springsteen meant in Darkness on the Edge of Town.
{get back to this thought later}
If the it that writers refer to when they worry about losing it is their mind, then Hemingway certainly lost his "it".
He blew it all over his breakfast plate one fine morning. Leaving little shards of his skull to mingle with his egg yolks, and turning his orange juice into a dark red pulp.
Just as much as acclaim, writers use their output to gauge proficiency. An auteur who produces one thin sheaf a year that only 20 or so people read, is not usually considered an accomplished writer, their misery might seem part and parcel. But Ernest Hemingway wrote great heaving reams of work. The man wrote prose like crack hookers blow cock, twenty pages a day in his lean times,
-and everyone read Hemingway!
Perhaps the reason Ernest chose to gauge his own success so suddenly and so violently is tied to what it means to identify oneself as a writer in the first place.
A writer is expected to turn it on at will, to never have a dry spell without the fear of losing the "gift", because seemingly, all writers tend to believe that their talent at writing is the one thing that can actually be lost, just like it were a set of keys.
Maybe this isn't such an absurd notion altogether, for writing is one of those things that you have to continue doing in order to identify yourself as a writer.
Crossley-04
Certainly the rapist does not share in this problem, he doesn't lose his title after a year or so of lying fallow, a rapist he remains, even after the testicles are removed so to speak.
One only needs to commit one solitary act of murder to cement himself in his chosen profession. But a writer that stops writing is a has been.
{perhaps a more light-hearted stanza here?}
Writing isn't necessarily therapeutic. Even when it is, it's never as cathartic as we would like it to be. It's how I imagine a closeted teen might feel after he finally comes out to his friends and family. He may be elated about getting secrets off of his chest, but it doesn't really make anything easier.
Even so, I'm horrified I might lose it. Sometimes I get so nervous about sitting down to write, because if it's not as good as some older piece, it might mean I'm losing the talent, and for some reason, superstitiously believing that when it is gone, it's gone for good. Seemingly, it doesn't matter that until I started school last fall, I hadn't written a single word in four years. If I can't sit down and write a stream of conscious prose piece in my usual voice, and have it turn out in the first draft. I must have lost the gift.{kinda stupid here MC}
I met Holly the first week of October, by the first week of May, I had convinced her to meet me for a proper date. A text explaining that she was running late only compounded my nervousness, it prolonged the inevitable moment, and meant that my beer wasn't going to last the remainder of the wait. We had been seeing each other for months but this was the first time we would meet before we started drinking. I tried to map out territories of conversation to lead through if need be
Crossley-05
I attempted to file the subjects I could expand on indefinitely if there came an unexpected lull in conversation. I dreaded coming across awkward, but there was no way to avoid it. I'm uncomfortable in unnatural conversations, and the only way for me to come across as I thought she saw me, was to imbibe a bit more. {stuck, finish later, or start up next Holly stanza still waiting for her}
It was a splendid early autumn afternoon in Weston Mass. when former model and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton pulled her black Mercedes into the garage of her white bricked Cape Cod wearing her mothers mink coat and a double strand of pearls. Anne had just finished lunch with her best friend and confidant Maxine Kumin where they went over the galleys of her eighth and newest book just then being prepared for publication. With the Mercedes precise German motor still running, Anne opened the drivers side door and got out to lock the door to the garage. No one was home, it was just to be sure. She then got back in the Black coupe and hit the button on the remote to close the garage door.
With the finely tuned motor of the luxury German car still running, Anne sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. She waited.
Look at the descriptors in the previous stanza for a moment if you will. Just from what you can glean from what I wrote about my favorite poet should be somewhat telling: She's beautiful, obviously successful, the mink might have been her mother's, but the pearls and Mercedes were hers. The house in Weston. She's previously published seven books and won a Pulitzer for at least one of them. What led this prolific writer down the grizzled path of mania to die alone in the placental sack of a black luxury car, choking on exhaust fumes in a cinder block room full of canned goods and socket wrenches?
Some might say Anne Sexton was predestined for death, but that's not accurate,
Crossley-06
we're all predestined for death, As the old saying goes about the only things that are certain. Sure, her critics turned on her, calling her "preening, lazy, & flip" towards the end. But surely a confessional poet had to be used to criticism?
Was it the critics? Was it the mental illness? Was it the alcohol? was it the it?
It starts to read like the MS billboards spackled all around Seattle.
Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was writers block. Maybe it was Perry Smith's Big Yellow Bird.
All I know is that it scares me, and that is the confession.
My Holly Go Lightly arrived gingerly at the table fifteen minutes later. I hadn't ordered another drink, I hadn't smoked a cigarette. When she sat down across from me, and immediately looked left to the other patrons. I knew she wasn't being aloof, she just didn't really know what to say. I had forgotten every single thing that I had pre-planned to converse about, but offered something on the spot I thought we could agree on. I asked her if she wanted to order a drink, which she did. And we proceeded with our date from there. Sometimes silent, but often talking, and often enough is usually good enough. The point is that I could speak if I felt I had to, but the silences, when they came, were necessary too. Getting to know someone is often akin to getting to know yourself, and besides, Seattle was particularly sunny that day.
I'll apologize in advance then.
I call her "Miss Go Lightly" only because her name is Holly, she doesn't remind me of Audrey Hepburn's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Quite the opposite actually.
Holly is uncomfortable around people, that's one of the things I like so much about her. She gives me one of those slight smiles where only the ends of the lips curl up
at my name dropping, her eyes dip downward from my gaze.
We're both agitated in the company of strangers unless we've been drinking, that was one of the qualities about me she found initially compelling.
As John Berryman stood on the cold concrete of the Washington Ave. bridge, looking at a gun metal gray Minnesota sky, I wonder if he jumped because he thought he had lost "it". it being that intangible thing that writers posses to help them write, and most are constantly in a state of panic about losing.
I wonder if John Berryman figured his last verse his best, and wondered if he could ever produce another one better. Or maybe he had the feeling that he needed to stop now, before he became a caricature of himself.
I suppose he could have been more calculating than that. I imagine he had to know that by jumping from that bridge on that dim winter afternoon, he would be forever etching his name onto the pantheon of accomplished writers.
It's 12:30 am on a Tuesday night, I'm walking slowly down the beer aisle of a grocery store. I'm not shopping, I'm buying. I know exactly what I want, the Pabst Blue Ribbon at the end of the aisle. I always walk slowly down the beer aisle, imagining the good times and great conversations possible in every bottle down the row. The multi-colored labels reflecting off of the light is like a carnival for the
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subconscious. The different tones and moods, all marketed to; the starkness of Session, somberness of Guinness, the impossible standards of Miller High Life. and finally, at the end, the Sesame Street of liquid patriotism, brought to you by the letters P, B, & R. A vision in red, white, & blue.
I grab my pack and make to exit, giving wide berth to a young man in a baseball cap and Tevas hoisting a case of Natural Light. He looks intoxicated already, and sways like he want's me to run into him. I have no less than 3 weapons on my person, I'm not worried about an altercation. I'm worried if he has an "it", and if he's afraid he might someday lose it.
Vachel Lindsay was the heir apparent to William Butler Yeats. His verse literally sang across the page with such meter and rhythm it's impossible not to chant it out in your head. "Mumbo Jumbo will hoodoo you" he wrote in The Congo. Not yet knowing that his own mumbo jumbo was going to shortly hoodoo him. He drank a bottle of Lysol when he thought he had lost it.
The wandering poet having made his final stop in the bathroom of his little house, and leaving his final stanza for his wife to find blue faced on the floor.
I met Holly at a friends party. This is over a year ago now. We would see each other at parties and talk alone outside about films and books for hours, chain-smoking and gulping down keg beer. I felt like I had known her for months before she finally gave me her phone number, telling me not to use it. She said she didn't like talking on the phone, I believed her without question. Neither of us has ever said that we need to take it slow, it is just something that we have done. On the rare occasion that I see her more than once a week, I fear that I might be smothering her.
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The darkness people mention that is supposedly inherent in writers, seems to hold it's own arcane appeal. One gets the idea that when darkness is mentioned in this context, it is the same way Victorian era Europeans used to describe Africa as the Dark Continent. Or what Bruce Springsteen meant in Darkness on the Edge of Town.
{get back to this thought later}
If the it that writers refer to when they worry about losing it is their mind, then Hemingway certainly lost his "it".
He blew it all over his breakfast plate one fine morning. Leaving little shards of his skull to mingle with his egg yolks, and turning his orange juice into a dark red pulp.
Just as much as acclaim, writers use their output to gauge proficiency. An auteur who produces one thin sheaf a year that only 20 or so people read, is not usually considered an accomplished writer, their misery might seem part and parcel. But Ernest Hemingway wrote great heaving reams of work. The man wrote prose like crack hookers blow cock, twenty pages a day in his lean times,
-and everyone read Hemingway!
Perhaps the reason Ernest chose to gauge his own success so suddenly and so violently is tied to what it means to identify oneself as a writer in the first place.
A writer is expected to turn it on at will, to never have a dry spell without the fear of losing the "gift", because seemingly, all writers tend to believe that their talent at writing is the one thing that can actually be lost, just like it were a set of keys.
Maybe this isn't such an absurd notion altogether, for writing is one of those things that you have to continue doing in order to identify yourself as a writer.
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Certainly the rapist does not share in this problem, he doesn't lose his title after a year or so of lying fallow, a rapist he remains, even after the testicles are removed so to speak.
One only needs to commit one solitary act of murder to cement himself in his chosen profession. But a writer that stops writing is a has been.
{perhaps a more light-hearted stanza here?}
Writing isn't necessarily therapeutic. Even when it is, it's never as cathartic as we would like it to be. It's how I imagine a closeted teen might feel after he finally comes out to his friends and family. He may be elated about getting secrets off of his chest, but it doesn't really make anything easier.
Even so, I'm horrified I might lose it. Sometimes I get so nervous about sitting down to write, because if it's not as good as some older piece, it might mean I'm losing the talent, and for some reason, superstitiously believing that when it is gone, it's gone for good. Seemingly, it doesn't matter that until I started school last fall, I hadn't written a single word in four years. If I can't sit down and write a stream of conscious prose piece in my usual voice, and have it turn out in the first draft. I must have lost the gift.{kinda stupid here MC}
I met Holly the first week of October, by the first week of May, I had convinced her to meet me for a proper date. A text explaining that she was running late only compounded my nervousness, it prolonged the inevitable moment, and meant that my beer wasn't going to last the remainder of the wait. We had been seeing each other for months but this was the first time we would meet before we started drinking. I tried to map out territories of conversation to lead through if need be
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I attempted to file the subjects I could expand on indefinitely if there came an unexpected lull in conversation. I dreaded coming across awkward, but there was no way to avoid it. I'm uncomfortable in unnatural conversations, and the only way for me to come across as I thought she saw me, was to imbibe a bit more. {stuck, finish later, or start up next Holly stanza still waiting for her}
It was a splendid early autumn afternoon in Weston Mass. when former model and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton pulled her black Mercedes into the garage of her white bricked Cape Cod wearing her mothers mink coat and a double strand of pearls. Anne had just finished lunch with her best friend and confidant Maxine Kumin where they went over the galleys of her eighth and newest book just then being prepared for publication. With the Mercedes precise German motor still running, Anne opened the drivers side door and got out to lock the door to the garage. No one was home, it was just to be sure. She then got back in the Black coupe and hit the button on the remote to close the garage door.
With the finely tuned motor of the luxury German car still running, Anne sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. She waited.
Look at the descriptors in the previous stanza for a moment if you will. Just from what you can glean from what I wrote about my favorite poet should be somewhat telling: She's beautiful, obviously successful, the mink might have been her mother's, but the pearls and Mercedes were hers. The house in Weston. She's previously published seven books and won a Pulitzer for at least one of them. What led this prolific writer down the grizzled path of mania to die alone in the placental sack of a black luxury car, choking on exhaust fumes in a cinder block room full of canned goods and socket wrenches?
Some might say Anne Sexton was predestined for death, but that's not accurate,
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we're all predestined for death, As the old saying goes about the only things that are certain. Sure, her critics turned on her, calling her "preening, lazy, & flip" towards the end. But surely a confessional poet had to be used to criticism?
Was it the critics? Was it the mental illness? Was it the alcohol? was it the it?
It starts to read like the MS billboards spackled all around Seattle.
Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was writers block. Maybe it was Perry Smith's Big Yellow Bird.
All I know is that it scares me, and that is the confession.
My Holly Go Lightly arrived gingerly at the table fifteen minutes later. I hadn't ordered another drink, I hadn't smoked a cigarette. When she sat down across from me, and immediately looked left to the other patrons. I knew she wasn't being aloof, she just didn't really know what to say. I had forgotten every single thing that I had pre-planned to converse about, but offered something on the spot I thought we could agree on. I asked her if she wanted to order a drink, which she did. And we proceeded with our date from there. Sometimes silent, but often talking, and often enough is usually good enough. The point is that I could speak if I felt I had to, but the silences, when they came, were necessary too. Getting to know someone is often akin to getting to know yourself, and besides, Seattle was particularly sunny that day.
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