this always happens:
sitting at tombstone
desk—blood clots from hours in this twobuck
torture-chair;
4AM? can barely read
my own thoughts,
neatly arranged,
painstakingly painted a
cross ether
glare of the computer screen.
Seven stanzas devolved
from the act
ual epiphany
of the p o e m;
chest tight,stomach churning acid from
cheap *** cheap cigarettes and cheap
grass rolled up in
99 cent Dutchmaster cigars—
Forgot to eat, forgot to hydrate, forgot to remember
the truth i was trying to forget
—forgot the point i was struggling to articulate;
Did i have a point?
I’m beginning to note tiny
Beings of Light
out’ve the corner of buzzing eyes,
all too familiar friends
friends of fiends, vampire junkies,
raving mad x-politicians,
and nocturnal suicide poets—
who after failing to get laid
in college bars
and drinking too much, too many boring conversations
with dull goons;
Get home, pour another glass,
cigarette to dry lip in perpetuum; beatiful Miles,
Porgy and Bess, sit down to
computer and write p o e t r y
not prose,
not prose—Man’s revelation of
histories to come, histories manifest.
not prose which brings Man’s higher-self
into the great
Universe-at-Large
but p o e t r y, pretentious,
narcissistic, self-important,
which alienates man from his tools of realities;
enemy of machine—but Man is machine;
no poetry is Man!
no poetry is animal,
primal, instinctive;
Well, **** me, half
way thru another cigar,
“maybe i’m not learned enough
to write a story, a **** good one at that…a novel
i’d say
-good luck you simple sloth…How
could you? just a regular self-loathing chimp
who writes — p o e t r y.”
really pondering
hard; thinking: i can’t be [that] dumb,
i'll admit what i don’t know,
(but Hell, least i’m smarter than the next guy, the
next guy, the next guy…til the next guy makes
me a **** fool; time to relocate and read some books.)
return my eyes to the computer screen,
re read what,
an hour ago,
i was, prematurely awarding myself the pulitzer prize for
as i see it now: pure
*******.
Devil’s attorney
slinking on slouched and grim drunken shoulder,
“hmm…and you say this is your forte?…
I wouldn’t kid yourself…kid.”
Warnings
in grave visions
of a desperate worm of a man
hunched at resin-stained desktop, scribbling away
His fancifull abstractions, broken man— Mad
and scared; shriveled,
scarred by regret—
Thought he was a talker;
witty, true like Bukowski,
or Heron;
Fresh,
inventive as cummings
or essential as Pound.
Simple
and brilliantly smooth
as W.C.A or W.C.W.
elegant, smart
and far-reaching as Eliot,
or the Old Romantics;
could have sworn his musings
Rapturous! no Thoreau, he,
nor as damaged as Poe be
under the Impression
He could stitch his Soul
into the seams of American Divine, direct such
spirits into p o e t r y as ***** ol Ginsberg did
so bravely, beautifully
as
Wherefore art
thou loving father? in Heavens is Walt
Whitman—
He
sure was;
He
was sure,
******* sure he
possessed a nugget of gold, mined
from inside each of these masterful
Mountains. panned entire sunsoaked cordillera;
yet
each night
would ‘finish’ a
p o e m,
clock out, tho
always would feel, incomplete,
nevermind how many p o e m s he wrote
hundreds, maybe thousands of
bottomless wells
of words;
Great Idea! Necessary Idea,
take action, he, in prose,
a form of action the action of wit,
to give human
body to formless, ex-humed soul—
Give soul to formless body of philosophy by god!
alas,
the schmuck
never
witty never
potent enough to pen a real
mother-****** of a story,
certainly
never could imbue a plot
with significance, endow with subtext
or builda character out of his p o e t r y,
Then give it the legs to run for two-
hundred pages—
He had the ****, just
not the ***** of it-all…
toiled, silly
in his nebulous, castrated,
dimlit room—swelling
whiskey or gin
cigarette glued to his dry lips, attempting
to romance the grey gods so
that thay mey spit mustard-seed
onto humbled holy head—
pray that it may grow, Flower
to full Bloom
even without
ever learning
his Biology.
…never
realizing what he had there—right
in front of him. Poor *******.
-Dumb. he was.
Cursed to be a P O E T.
and doomed to fail as one.
I hate the sound of the Sunrise
when i’ve been up, writing all night; it’s
an alarm like bones in a blender
thru an endless
waking dreamscape;
Sitting, thinking loosely,
wildly, loose-
change two-cent thoughts—
This
this is when regulatory bodies
are disabled, de
funded; radioactive runoff (operational hazards)
contaminates
pure streams;
...random billboard pop
t-r-a-s-h drift in
and out of mind(probably from
the endless drone of those same 3 chords in
any store or restaurant you enter. How about some Classical?
Math: the food ain’t rot ‘em enough, let’s assault
their other senses of taste. Quick. while
we’ve got them swine trapped!)
politcal memes, halftruths and
newsday buzzwords flash, bright and
silly then recede into obscurity;
only to discover, the next morning,
their greasy finger-prints
given gimcrack shine to deeppurple dawn
Gibberish. trife piffle. bunkum and balderdash,
gobbledygook, mumbojumbo jackshit slangspit
hogwash, ** lotta raspyutintutyncomman nonsensses hoosis mut nowago sayawahhesay too dum for dada…
My
yawns
are now childish giggling;
My concentrated writings. none of it makes any sense to me.
Searching for a distraction
To regain my focus, composure…
biting
nails, tapping Art Blakey grooves on tired desk,
inspecting burning cigarette, forensically.
Oh—
look around for my cat, come here, co
me here kitty. (ah yea, comforted
by familiar purring, a hum from under the bed;
-Close my eyes,
to centralize
to meditate
to ***** out
inanimate,moving parts
to put finger
to pulse of programmed nub;
to create value
for a dying currency of language;
to whisper sweet nothings
in the ears of tender muses
and meaty hookers.
-At this juncture:
reconciled
where the finish line is
strung,
how it appears to me…only snag:
by the time i get here—none
of these
nothing have no meaning
writing,this,that? what? be
low my paygrade *******;
Let stew; sleepy,
delirious, suicidal, anxious, sorta
*****, deadly confident;
Let stew...
…then it hit me like a Point of Intoxication!
brilliantly constructed
Words,
words hanging,
hanging
like a,
Renaissance-style portrait
above a fireplace in an enlightened *****-den,
-for a moment, seen clearly thru parting
of deadeye yellowsmoke sea.
Maladroit,
hallucinatory, went to type,
thought better,
no doubt would ****** such
sudden genius,
fumbled for recorder, gotcha
click:
closed my eyes oncemore
to review this epiphany, to record it.
relayed, recited
like a prayer;
perfectly—this must be what the body
of Christ feels like…
when done, i, exhausted,
smiled like a son a *****
how fine
that P O E M is gonna look,
when written
down all nice and neatly.
it was close(but i knew i'd pull
something revelatory out’ve
my ***.)
satisfied,
if my pants weren’t dry
i'd swear i came.
...the following afternoon,
Upon waking, coffee, cigarette, news
in the background,
grab the recorder to listen to this opus;
well,
**** ME!
if
i didn’t make sure there was any space left
on the ****** thing!
bye bye my petty kubla khan
Smart Boy.
ah well...
it’s just
P O E T R Y ya know.
