poems and a short short
Lackluster love for the poet
In these late days.
Could it be that their hearts
Do not sing as brightly as mine?
Shrouded in dank, and
The earth creeks, moves,
Splits from the middle,
and bleeds deeply.
No, there is little love
For the poet, but the need,
The need is high, they need
The poet to help them rise.
Yes, lackluster love for the poet,
And I sit here and cry,
For the gentleness, and warmth
Of a long forgotten world.
There are morning showers
And I am missing him.
The sky opens it tight seal,
Drops, like blood, fall.
The dawn comes,
Old homeless men on benches lie
Still, covered with yellow tarps,
And the police just chat.
They will not see the sun this day,
Died alone, without the company
Of others. It's my greatest fear.
Will I be that man?
And, it rains, it rains and
Rains. Obfuscated views take hold,
;We are confused, and
Nothing is clear.
He sits at his desk wondering what the story will be about this time. The image of a man walking, no, running in a forest pops into his brain. So he goes with it, telling of the man's struggle with the elements and his want to get home and his need to be part of a larger society-- halfway through, he knows it's complete crap, fifty minutes wasted on crap.
He holds the delete key until the screen glows white.
He gets up and goes outside to smoke, but the whole time he's not thinking of the smoke he keeps blowing into the night, he's thinking Fuck, still nothing, damn story's due tonight and still, nothing.
Okay, he sits back down at the old wooden desk his grandfather brought over from Italy and runs his hands over the soft wood and it comes to him, an old world immigration story. He types away, telling about the boat and the smells and the moving flesh without a face and the sick passengers and how the little boy fell over in the middle of the voyage and how the parents wept and how they felt lost and how they struggled to bring their family to the new world and just as he is getting to their arrival to America, he realizes that the story has to be told in the first person. Fuck.
He starts again, but this time the story isn't fluid, the boy's death doesn't work; there is no "other thing". He gets up to have another cigarette and by this time the moon has set and he knows that he only has a precious few hours left to get this story done. Why did he wait till the last night? He wonders.
He goes back inside and takes a shower, but it doesn't help much, he gets out and his room is cold and he's naked and the cat is lying on his bed and the clock is still ticking and all he can think abut is getting the story (which he has no idea about) down on his computer and he is still cold and nothing, NOTHING! And, he's still cold.
That's it, the cold! He's writing now, furiously, figuratively about how man is out in the cold and how he wants too much from life, but is it really a story or just a rant? It has no plot, characters float in and out, Pynchon got away with it, so why couldn't he? He rattles on about some far off war and its effect on the home front and how men from the narrator's town have gone off to experience futile deaths at the hands of unknown enemies, he tells of women, young, old, tearing out into the street, gnashing their teeth and crying out to the world, wondering why their sons husbands lovers and brothers came to such an end. The narrator tells of his own experience in the war and how he comes back and has no idea how to relate to the people who never saw war and how his family looks old and incoherent and how there are no jobs and how he can't find love. The final image is of a man standing at the edge of town staring into the rising sun, and running, running toward the sunrise.
He's finished, thirty-seven pages of brilliance. He watches as the clean white sheets of eight-five pound test linen blend paper have ink sprayed upon them. The final page, really the first page of the story, but the last page to come out, prints. It's done, and it's dawn and he's done.
There is a lizzard,
He lives on my porch.
The smoke difts skyward
And he cares less.
The aged lesbian couple,
Dressed in cowboy garbe,
They kiss and dance.
Karoke causes the nameless to sing.
The night passes by
Without incident.
There is no man killed
By the carelessness of others.
We area all peacable;
Capable of compassion.
It is the other who chooses
To harm.
The old men sit
Asking for another pint.
Outside, frostbitten skies,
Grey hued, and white,
Give way to little light.
Your quiet streets,
They haunt the night.
Archaic tales whisp along
Your patures.
Old women, swaddled,
Like children long gone,
Lurk along your cobbled streets.
The night falls,
And all is still.
Families, tired from
The busy day, light
Their lounges with drink
And wild talk.
Why?
Well, there's an underworld of course,
One that we are only peripherally aware of.
It seethes and moves around us.
It corrupts the fundamentals,
Laying in wait for those who fall through the cracks.
The sun goes down,
We see it for an instant
at the horizon.
Flesh smiles at the cannibal.
We live in a self destructive society,
Nothing is good enough, at least--
We have choice right?
We can change?
Or, is it in change that we are unhappy?
The transition is painful.
The night, before the dawn, is,
by necessity, terrifying.
Beginning and end points,
These are not what scare us,
it is that moment in the middle;
The moment of choice.