Writer’s Workshop

The best writing advice I ever received wasn’t intended as writing advice. It was in sleepaway camp when I was just 12 years old. My bunkmates and I had congregated on a two-lane bridge over the Delaware River. I was standing beyond the safety railing, staring down at the wind-ruffled water. Three or four others had gone off the bridge without incident ahead of me. Nonetheless, gripped by fear and doubt, I hesitated. “Come on already!” my bunkmates finally all started yelling. “Jump!”

"We Ascribe To Nature How We Treat Each Other”

The difference between death and extinction
Is in the molecule of suffering that gives us light,
That makes us want to preserve the joys in despite of the indifferent universe.
That icy darkness that alienates us from ourselves,
As much as we might think struggling for good is pointless.
And which sorts us as naturally separate as on a capitalist’s conveyor belt,
Or other images of what profitably decimates life
Which have been with us since the romantics.
Since that industrialism that will consume us all in black;
But for our striving still to defeat what postures
It can’t be defeated.
I wonder if we thought up an indifferent world
Out of the calculated indifference of the order which birthed us.
These grim Appalachian hills and deadness to the oppression
Of history in the silhouettes
Of property. At least you, the poem
Is such a good way to man our spirits up
And say fuck you to resignation.
Especially to that constant patriarch who is chief executive
Of the world.

nightstick 

watch me on the ground:
silent as concrete
and all the little holes of blood
that are thought to be intellect
undiscovered,
tumbling
like beads from a cheap necklace,
ripped by a rabid hand.

my skull in so many places.

would you rather
i bawl like a baby
than lay here, breathing when i need to,
waiting for blind hands
to lock mine together?
i can’t tell you how much it hurts.
i can’t tell you the truth.

MRS B’S CROOKED TEETH

You, the wife of a handsome English prof
who made literature sing.
We, the hippies who lionized him.

We came to your porch evenings,
drank and smoked dope,
marveled at his insights,
e.e. Cummings to Shakespeare.

But I felt a weird vibe.
As the prof drank more and more,
he began  to ogle the hippie chicks,
flirt with them, stare at their braless breasts,
letch at them and ignore you.

Mrs. B., an Iowa farm daughter,
your teeth turned your face ugly
compared to the nymphs
who oohed and aahed at your husband
who unabashedly played to them,
left you, mouth closed, lips protruding
rooted in your church shoes,
sipping a Coke through a straw
to prevent hand wringing,
a simple dress, revealing
an awkward body, hiding
a burgeoning figure, babies
asleep inside, unawares.

I’m just a repentant, old hippie guy
who did his own damage to women
back in the Day. Mrs. B., I’ve mused
about you in my retirement years.
Hope you fled to better off.

Input

 
You know, I listen to
Whatever you say.
Input is always good.
Hashing things over
Deep In the mind is
A part of anyone’s
Thinking  process.
Just remember that
When I do ask you
For your opinion,
I’m really only being
Polite.  It’s not as if
I actually give a shit.

Loneliness


It follows me
wherever I go—
the factory,
the supermarket,
the bank,
even my apartment.

I can't ever
get away from it,
like some kind of ghost
that's haunting me.

It's there
when I'm at work
and feeling
barely human.

It's there
when I'm taking a piss
in the silence
of a bathroom.

It's there
in the cab
when I'm too exhausted
to make small talk
with my driver.

And it's there
when I'm the only one
at home still awake,
just trying to find the will
to make it through
another night
with this damn thing
hovering over me.

  WHAT WE DO WHEN THE WORLD
  DOESN’T DEMAND WE DO ANYTHING

 
I scribble a line on a piece of paper,
maybe a stanza too—for future reference.
I may use none of them any time soon,
as the lines and stanzas that have gotten backed up

can attest to—orphans with a home
and a hope that one day I will employ them.
I notice a woman in a motorized wheelchair,
her dog keeping pace, stepping quite elegantly.



   THE WORLD WILL SURELY END


while I’m finishing a poem,
the last line smoothed in like butter
on toast.
The day won’t be glorious,
but it will be sweet,
the sun out
and just a nip of chill in the air.
I’ll be pulled
out the window, sucked
up into the clouds and going from there,
joining so many others,
what traffic!
I often wondered where we would ultimately
wind up, such dreams I had.
And now
I’ll know, I’ll know if any of them were true.

Buenos Aires: Last Entry
 

Flying over her casa muy grande at one a.m. the rough sea of roof heaves.
Shingles rattle & twist. Blackened windows battle the gabled main.

Chimneys shoot into air, flip, & corkscrew-dive off the mountainous manse’s 
darkened cliffs. Then afterwards we run through the neighborhood, sit 

under low-hanging boughs of old tilo tree, take food to children of hunger 
silhouetted against the drizzled monument as white mastiffs dig up the obscure

moon. In her father’s shadowy study, we pitchfuck each other like footballs 
onto red cushions. We touch & pull close every glistening object. & taste it. 

Nobody had any concept of what we were up to. Till self-deceived state 
machines stormwashed our fiction into the gutter, ravaging infinity inside us.

Whatever power she plugged into I received through her gaze. I’ve been left behind 
to sketch mis alucinaciones. Abandoned with nothing but this sputtering lamp. 

Rug Pull


He had faith in the project,
but didn’t know what the project did.
 
The fundamentals were strong,
though not clearly defined.

The interest rate was out of this world,
not to mention the referral program

and the social media community
buzzed with positivity.

But the project’s white paper did not include
a timetable indicating when, exactly,
the rug would be pulled. 

At the Circus

I found myself stranded without a map or compass, a weekend sailor shipwrecked in the middle of history, no place anyone would choose on their own to go, home to shit talkers, freaks, depressives, religious nuts, and sociopaths, including one with a special  interest in Kafka and his twice broken engagement to Felice and another who took my phone and all my money and then, as if we had been intimate, shared with me a sort of postcoital cigarette and the secret of how clowns get inside very small cars in very large numbers.



True History

It feels a lot like a Monday, faces on the street and at the office twisted in a grimace. The moment you step away everything changes. People scream, “Hitler should come back and gas you!” Your true history is scratched out, replaced by libels. Accused of aiding and abetting morbid introspection, you’re forced not only to walk on your knees, but also to wear a crown of thorns in public for easy identification. Some of those watching will be turned by government decree into superhumans, others into lamp shades. A licensed therapist assures those in need of assurance that it’ll be alright either way. 



ARS POETICA

If you write a poem

And no one publishes it,

Does it make a sound?