strait up #164 (bitches)
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(<(STRAIT UP, Issue #164)>)
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I. intro
II. links
III. poetry
1. "the season has lips"
2. "good morning"
3. "foggy weigh station blues"
4. "sweet and honey combed"
5. "snowman in June"
6. "a leisure cruise in the Buick"
7. "writing as a memory exercise,
or memory as a writing exercise"
8. "when she kisses me"
9. "FUCK!"
10. "Shellahammer Rd."
11. "No sleep while its sleeting"
12. "the icebreaker"
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intro:
there have been so many damn issues of strait up. strait up is almost six years old. i have been writing my entire life, but strait up kind of marked the beginning of me as a serious writer. much of my writing style was originally based on songs. most of it was childish, heartfelt, and utterly embarassing at this point in my life. there are very few things written between age 14 and age 16 that i even want to see at this point in my life. there were a few gems, but most of my original poetry was crap. yet, a handful of you read it, and from that handful i developed a small following. i began reading e.e. cummings, Whitman, Langston Hughes, and other poets and my style of writing changed with each word i read. most of my early poems revolved around love or lack thereof, but the more i read, the more my subject matter broadened. those first few years writing were tough, teenage angst ridden years. but towards the end of tenth grade, i started to read even more and started reading the Beat era writers obsessively. around the same time, i began my intrest in drugs and punk/indie music. it was a time of transition.
then i was kicked out of school for taking sleeping pills in english class. this was a sort of a rebirth for me. i broke away from a long term relationship, lost nearly all of my "friends", and had to start at ground zero with my parents. i felt the same way about my poetry. i began to write furiously, fueled by anger and hurt and my new 'beat' influences. i also began to add more contemplativeness and circumspect to my words. all i had was work and writing for several months.
by the time i was in 11th grade, i was writing better and reading outloud at poetry readings in HBG. i had solidified relationships with certain people in 10th grade, people who were still willing to be friends with me after my supposed overdose. they were were writers (tandlmayer), eccentrics (marty), maniacs (squaresky), and smart-asses (casey).
i wish i could tell you the detailed history from there on, but i dont have room or time. but basically, i see what happened at the end of 10th grade as a cleaning of the slate for me. for a time, i was not allowed contact outside of school or work, and therefore, all i really had was my writing. it became my one true love and eventually became more a part of me than my body. my words were there for me when i had nobody.
and since then, i have seen myself as a writer. since then, i have been developing my voice, my style. i see amost everything i wrote before age 17 as growth, growth in the direction of writing. after that point, i have been exercising, developing, toning my mental muscle. in the past two years or so, i have had to myself and to others that i was a writer. i am strong, but i must continue to grow. i must continue to exercise and expand my mind.
this issue of SU is an issue of exercise. these are poems written between fall 2002 and winter 2004. several of them have been shown in strait up, but they did not look the way they do now. these are new-old poems, developed over time. these are snapshots of the near past, not as embarassing as my oldest poems, but pictures of me at a still awkward age. the next issue of strait up will be new material, from the past year, but this issue is nothing but weird nostalgia. i hope you enjoy the poety, but dont forget to send me your own writing because i want to put out an issue with my friends again, soon.
-john robert rogers
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links:
Skonrog
bip
Erowid Splash Page
I am shaman.com
Church Group Offers Homosexual New Life In Closet
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"the season has lips" John Rogers ©2005
today, the leaves are
every color of lipstick
I have ever encountered:
Autumn has arrived.
she is a big, blustery woman,
kissing everything,
making leaves drop dead.
(10/7/02, 10/8/05)
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"good morning" John Rogers ©2005
on good mornings, I wake up
sandwiched between
the first rays of dawn
and your sleeping body.
You may or may not
have stolen all of the covers
...regardless,
there is a arm and a leg thrown
over me, pulling me into you.
Your body heat
disables me,
your naked skin
distracts me.
I hit the snooze button
and decide to be late
for where ever it is I have to go.
(11/10/04, 10/2/05)
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"foggy weigh station blues" John Rogers ©2005
The glow of truck stops and interstate
dulls the night sky to the point where you
can only make out the largest and brightest
constellations.
Orion is present.
The seven sisters are nearly invisible.
Tonight,
there are clouds everywhere.
Clouds in the sky
clouds in the streets
clouds on the highway
clouds in the yards
clouds in the clouds.
Tonight, stars were myths
and opaque gray ceiling
was the only reality.
I look in the direction of Harrisburg
and see the light pollution reflected off the fog,
a mass of thick white vapor
ghosting above the city.
(11/8/04, 10/2/05)
~~
"sweet and honey combed" John Rogers ©2005
The brown crust of conscience
crumbles...
gives way to creamy, dreamy
indifference.
The night buzzes, fluorescing
in the blustery brilliance
of a hive.
My honey comb glistens;
my eyes glaze over.
The knockout will come sweetly,
swiftly at dawn.
(6/10/04, 10/4/05)
~~
"snowman in June" John Rogers ©2005
you wave to me as I drive
by you, your limbs jerk
and your face looks like
a snowman; coal eyes,
carrot nose, and pale white
flesh...your eyes shuffle
back and forth between
indifferent and insane,
and now, now I am sad
to say that your bones
are starting to wriggle
starting with your nose.
(6/3/04, 10/4/05)
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"a leisure cruise in the Buick" John Rogers ©2005
epigram:
"This was a top of the line luxury sedan in its day." -Jason Adams
The road rises up in waves and all odds seem against our bets.
A great green ripple pushes me
and my car
spins into
limbo.
The road sniffles,
shuffles and I am reminded
of a slot machine.
There is nothing to be found
on these stoned,
hill-billy
back roads.
Road signs pass by in a flurry: four A.M. driving is king hell on the mind.
The moon is a triceratops tonight
and the trees just shrug and burn.
On our way home, I forgot who was driving
and all we could say
for the last 10 minutes of the drive
was,
"What?"
and
"Nothing."
"Oh."
(6/2/04, 10/4/05)
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"writing as a memory exercise, or memory as a writing exercise" John Rogers ©2005
My memory somewhat occurs
as a broken series of fractured moments
flashbacks flooding back to the floating consciousness
of my waking hours:
Random snapshots
thoughts
opinions
urges
ideals
emotions
and long forgotten television shows
pop up
like a game
of mental whack-a-mole
in the arcade of my mind.
(5/25/04-10/2/05)
~~
"when she kisses me" John Rogers ©2005
when she kisses me, the sun might as well be a 35 watt lightbulb,
when she kisses me, pilots all around the globe do loop de-loops,
when she kisses me kittens get dizzy,
tiny exotic capsaicin explosions occur in my brain,
when she kisses me, it reminds me of tasting the belly of a cloud,
it makes me think that god might be a woman and the two of them must be related if not sisters,
when she kisses me, everything I see turns the color of her eyes,
when she kisses me, satyrs blush,
torpedoes morph into dolphins,
my heart bursts in a firework bouquet of lilies and green flame.
she is a creature of light, stretching endless arms
across the vast, loose, frayed seams of my ragged existence,
pulling me together,
keeping me just sane enough in the midst of this mad, mad world.
she is more than a person; she is a spirit, a presence.
She is something I can feel when in the air when I walk into a room.
she is something beyond alive.
If she kissed you the way she kisses me, you wouldn't need people or persons,
you wouldn't need a job or school,
a car or a house or food or money,
you wouldn't need life or death,
you wouldn't need heaven or hell,
you wouldn't need a goddamned thing,
you might not even need god...
all you would need is her.
I don't think you understand,
when she kisses me,
there
is
nothing else.
(Winter 2003-10/2/05)
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"FUCK!" a found poem by John Rogers
Mark Twain
wrote that
swearing is
Sometimes
the best thing to do;
to get our point across.
Of course sometimes
we need to use slang or strong
words
it all depends
on the context
"under certain circumstances
profanity provides
a relief denied
even in prayer."
(Spring 2003, Miss Long's Creative wring class)
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"Shellahammer Rd." John Rogers, Copyright © 2005
Pillow cases catch the blazing headlights of Autumn,
ranting the maddened streets.
"This here is the very spot..."
Costumed caricatures,
dancing orange in the glow
cast by false jack-o-lanterns
"...the very spot where I died..."
The propsed street masquarade; a menagerie of startling characters:
...the bedsheet ghost with a sucking chestwound
...the vampire who never sleeps due to constant bloodlust
...the Frankenstein's monster who believes his tortured form
is a reflection of his surroundings.
"...and right over there..."
Poor kids shuffle out of surrounding tenements, boonies and trailer parks
(in search of rotten teeth)
reeking of Golgotha and deficiency.
To the rich kids, this was an acrid whiff of fragrence,
an odor steeped in perfume:
A skunk on a cheap date.
Drunk in the sewer of childish selective memory games...
forgetting me,
forgetting me not
"...there, across the street..."
Some would rather forget, would prefer to blink me out of sight,
a mere speck in the eye.
There are some people I would rather forget.
"...I was..."
(Nullification)
This is the end
lay me out,
cold...dire...comatose
black and blue on black and white
on grey on grey on grey
on Red
and finally,
Nothing.
"This here is the very spot where I died...
and right over there, across the street,
I was reborn."
(11/10/02, 12/17/03, 10/11-13/05)
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"No sleep while it's sleeting" John Rogers ©2005
Standing very Casablanca, facing the sleet:
sweating cold sheets of water,
frozen by the airplane-less sky.
No people in sight.
I am wearing an unusual hat
with the collar of my trench coat turned up,
smoking calm cigarettes
and grimacing at the pale skull of the moon,
that sad white-blue deathmask of a child,
hovering above me,
deep in the jet black throat of night.
Tears...suddenly, sometimes anger
Staring...starting out into the streets of space
and the fields of infinity everlasting.
The sirens of fate sing pissy songs
into the majority of my eardrums,
gargling static into a vacuum.
I choose to ignore whatever it is that is bothering me
ignore everything that is wrong with the world,
acknowledging the fact that most of these things
are entirely out of my hands.
I stand, staring wide-eyed and bloodshot
into the shimmer of radio night
and somewhere I hear a piano playing.
(10/29/02-9/29/05)
~~
"the icebreaker" John Rogers ©2005
burrowing through old notebooks,
observing the messy scrawl of
my personal episodes of mad teen angst;
I found a story about a girl who cried:
"she cried," it said.
"whenever she cried,
her tears would roll down her cheek
then meet the earth as snowflakes.
"I felt bad whenever it happened in front of me.
I felt bad, so I fled, fleeing the mood engulfing
the spectacle before me
but returned when I experienced
that cold feeling in the pit of my stomach
a coward gets when he realizes he's a coward.
"when I returned, it seemed as if she had died.
she was pale and distant, her eyes dull.
"as a joke, I offered to gather her snowflakes
and make snow men to keep her company.
"she told me to fuck off."
"the world slowly became a haze at this point.
I went into the basement and cowered on the wet floor,
shivering, bearded, crazy.
"eventually, I recovered and
armed myself to the teeth.
I even grew fangs.
I learned how to shoot simply because I had so much ammunition.
"on an anonymous September night
I stopped by to see if
her condition had improved.
"all she had to say was, 'what the fuck are you doing in my kitchen,
it's nine o-fucking-clock at night on a Sunday, you didn't call
and I didn't want to see you. now, get the fuck out.'
"her eyes remained dry and lifeless through her tirade."
"I left the house satisfied.
I had finally broken the last thread,
burned the last bridge, become a monster
or hopefully nothing,
effectively repulsing her so much
that she hated me.
"I was finally satisfied and could finally say we were
finished. I smiled to myself as I got in my car,
and laughed
as the steam that came out of my mouth
melted a few snowflakes
as they fluttered past my nose.
"The End."
at the bottom of the page
was the lesson I learned
from my attempts
at callousness:
"The moral of the story: any girl can weep ice
but there are two types.
the difference between them:
some must be warmed up,
others have to be dried out."
(10/17/02, 10/8/05)
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i
i
i
i
i
V
scroll down
you know there
is something crazy down there
go ahead
look...
Ganjabeard: why dont ya ghoul me up
Ganjabeard: ghoulie ole baby til you let me down
Ganjabeard: and ghoul me around
Ganjabeard: i need ghoul
Dragon2124: why dont you answer yer goddamn phone slut
Ganjabeard: (ghoul)
Ganjabeard: more than anyone ghoulie, i cant get the ghoul out of my life
Dragon2124: ghoul it up
Dragon2124: haha
Ganjabeard: so please just ghoul me up, ghoulie ole darlin
Ganjabeard: and you know i will
Ganjabeard: ghoul it up
Ganjabeard: ghould it ole darlin
Ganjabeard: i was out of town a bit this wochenenden
Dragon2124: aye
Ganjabeard: we goota hook it up next wochenended
Dragon2124: ya
Dragon2124: ich heisse ghoulie
Ganjabeard: i heart the ghoul
Ganjabeard: you at your house or your apt ?
Dragon2124: house
Dragon2124: working on strait up
Ganjabeard: good man
Ganjabeard: put an excerpt in there about the 'ghoul me up buttecup' song
Dragon2124: ghoul me up
buttercup
dont break my ghoul
Ganjabeard: yeah if you would break my ghoul
Ganjabeard: heads would roll
Dragon2124: indooz
Ganjabeard: phew
Ganjabeard: almost burnt my friesa
Ganjabeard: fries
Ganjabeard: daddy o
Dragon2124: obo daddy o ghoulo dabba ghoul frie cook
Ganjabeard: WOAH
Ganjabeard: ghoulie session
Dragon2124: all ghouled up and i dont know what to do
Ganjabeard: oh poor guy
Dragon2124: writers (tandlmayer), eccentrics (marty), maniacs (squaresky), and smart-asses (casey).
Ganjabeard: haha
Ganjabeard: indooz
Dragon2124: that line will be in strait up
Ganjabeard: hahaha right on
Ganjabeard: im pretty sure i am insane
Ganjabeard: at least in more of a degree than 'normal' people
Dragon2124: i know you are, but im pretty sure i am too
Ganjabeard: yeah, i was going to say - i cant categorize any of my friends as 'normal'
Ganjabeard: most of us are straight up insane :)
Dragon2124: nope
Dragon2124: true and true
Ganjabeard: live it upp
Ganjabeard: ill be right back
Ganjabeard signed off at 9:29 PM
Dragon2124: aight
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news taken from The Onion - America's Finest News Source :
'Tony's Law' Would Require Marijuana Users To Inform Interested Neighbors
March 2, 2005 | Issue 41•09
WASHINGTON, DC-Citizens spoke before Congress Monday in support of Tony's Law, a Senate measure that would require all marijuana-law offenders to inform their neighbors if they're holding.
"Right now, countless Americans are living on the very same blocks as convicted illegal-drug users," said Sharon Logan of the Weed For Tony Coalition. "Without a federal mandate requiring full disclosure, how are unsuspecting residents supposed to find any decent weed?"
Designed to protect Americans from dry spells, Tony's Law was named after 19-year-old New Jersey resident Tony DiCenzo, who went nine months without getting high before discovering that he lived in the same apartment building as a reliable marijuana source.
"Can you imagine the shock and anger Tony must have felt when he found out that the guy on the second floor possessed the Schedule I federal controlled substance?" Logan said. "The offender could have invited poor Tony into his apartment to smoke some at any time. It's heartbreaking."
Tony's Law would create a national public registry of drug-law offenders' names, addresses, and pager numbers. Additionally, offenders charged with dealing marijuana would be required to either post signs or go door-to-door and let neighbors know when they're holding.
Privacy-rights groups oppose the legislation on the grounds that it violates the individual's right to a stash, but Austin, TX's James W. Clancy is one of many stoner-rights lawyers who traveled to Washington to rally in favor of the law's passage.
"Millions of Americans love to be high," Clancy said. "Unfortunately, their neighbors often keep them in the dark about what kind of shit is going around."
Clancy and other proponents of Tony's Law argued that the bill would result in increased domestic trade in consumer snack products and a heightened sense of community and well-being.
More powerful, perhaps, were the personal testimonials of hundreds of drug-drought victims, who stood before lawmakers to share their experiences with dope deprivation.
"As a parent, I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to finding weed," Minneapolis resident Kyle Berman said. "All my wife and I wanted to be able to do was get Tina and Tyler to bed, put on a movie, and smoke a joint. It wasn't until the police busted the guy across the street for growing marijuana that we realized how close we'd come to actually finding some pot. A whole set-up with lamps and everything was less than 50 feet from our living room. It sickens me to think about it."
Several lawmakers have spoken out in opposition to Tony's Law, largely due to what Rep. Chris Chocola (R-IN) called "complications stemming from the illegality of marijuana."
Nonetheless, the bill's many devoted supporters said they'll continue their fight.
"After nine months of hell, Tony eventually found a hook-up through the friend of a guy whose brother met someone at a former girlfriend's birthday party," activist Stephen Miller said. "In spite of the nightmare he was going through, Tony didn't give up...and neither will we."