To Ex-Girlfriends

 

stomping, glorious shapely gears, dangerous curves

turn on your large hips and walk away,

mumbling “fuck you” fumbling ample breasts

back into the bodice because I bounced in erect

with no bullshit and wouldn’t say I love you

you can’t reverse gears now you’ve

swallowed me you hate me why you hang

around me I could make nice or we could

watch fireworks later, settle into why I’m not

how you are how many times you lie on me

angry you tell me you faked, tell your friends

“I never fucked him” meanwhile I meditate,

meshed, mashed mouths into you

I never lie, never sleep without you, not

asleep, in love with someone else

unable to matter to you, to be your friend

and lover, you think love and law guilt

and sin and blame coven and covenant

I think like a man, a monkey merely

filthy and “pussy” scared you know

you let me in I tell myself you would

do it again I awake a world away a married

man 12 steps from poetry to slavery

love and sex and pure knavery and not

regrets

 

 

Curriculum Vitae

 

It is important to practice your craft. Try to hone your poems down to concise and finely tuned statements about the true beauty in the world. Send these pithy ruminations to magazines and publishers who seem to share your view of the arts or to those whom you admire. Be persistent. No one likes a quitter or those who are easily discouraged. Try to get a foothold in Academic circles. Much success for a poet can be had with those who read and are conversant in the language of books. Maintain an air of humility as you continue to sharpen your skills. Let others make the seminal observations about your writing and your character. Garner awards so soon your newest collection of poems will have some sort of a medallion on it or at least some addendum to your name signifying you are one of the true young lions of the literary world. At some point it may be necessary to formally approach poetry with a book of sonnets or sestinas or historically highly regarded forms. A language phase may be added consisting of words which ring and shine for their own sake. Actually, settle down somewhere back East or in some mystical locale made famous by your own verse. In this time speak of the spirit of the place you inhabit. Even use the term Zeitgeist and see if you can get away with saying Weltanschauung. Become obsessed with the plight of some group and their struggle and devote two or three books to heroic songs of justice in their name. Get a job at a university of your choice because you love to give back to young people. Write your observations on the world to your local paper or even to some lucky periodical of which the editorial staff will be so thrilled to have your input. Become an actual charity or an endowment of some kind so people will see and hear your name when they watch PBS shows and other younger writers can get money and medallions and addendum on their books. Champion a few of them and maybe have some affairs. Get to know some famous people but make sure they see you as aloof or somehow above everything that goes on or inexplicably dark of mood. Become some kind of living national treasure whom someone undoubtedly will say the very advancement of letters could not have been possible without your contribution. Design a building for your foundation. Scratch that. Have a committee design a building for your foundation and hire a famous architect to build it. Probably on the grounds of the university you are now an absolute bulwark of culture within. Make sure the building is expansive and ornate with wings and futuristic furniture and green over there and orange over there. Go out of fashion quietly and without unseemly protest about how you no longer understand the world or young people. Understand that the smell of your books will be slightly musty and reflect your death in the way a poem never could when some literature professor you taught tasks a student with writing a paper about you and your poems which after all is said and done are exactly what always came first.