On Poetry again

I used to be a poet once before, but then, as now, I was shy about it, though pretty damned industrious. I winnowed my stuff down to the three most important words. All of the poetry in me equaled three words.

I even went to a class or two and read my shit scrabbled on the back of napkin of all things to a predictably motley collection of poets who like me had just died and died and died when they realized that people like Eliot or Frost or Walt fucking Whitman happened once and they aren’t us.

In any case all three of those worthies are dead and buried which leaves you with me. And I’m impoverished in every way that counts. I’m not sad about that or down in the mouth or anything else which might smell like defeat.

I acknowledge. I move on. It’s just that, and please note that I’m not complaining, I’m not quite sure how to begin.

In any case, they didn’t like it or me, my fellow dead smelling poets. I couldn’t tell whether I was too serious or not nearly serious enough. I couldn’t really tell whether I was mocking them or aping them (an unfortunate, but entirely serviceable term). In any case I was drummed out in short order and they even took away my fucking pencil.

I didn’t get the girl. I didn’t gain friends or influence people. Sure, I read some and talked a little, but that is all ash now. Plath certainly said it better just a few short breathes before she stuck her fucking head in the oven, but a bright spot (I think I’m verging on pun here, which is a finely realized form of poetry) is that ash is before everything else, before you get sad thinking about it and ruin your make up, before it blows away, before we smear it on our foreheads in place of rubbing blue mud on our bellies I guess, ash is first and foremost, evidence of fire. Think of that. They should have seen me burn.

Rounding things out. Wind doesn’t begin or end. Conversations falter and are put off but are never over. The wind is phatic in nature. People can talk about anything.

So, now, probably ten years later, I’m a poet again. I think the other poets have died and gone away or are in any case hiding unrecognizably inside fat but still apparently fuckable soccer moms. Though I don’t talk about it much, I know that I beat my part of them into a bloody fucking pulp as a sort of extended dance which is most easily and serviceably misunderstood as a sort of extended misunderstanding – them of me, I of them, all of us of poetry, which I’ve come to understand and will argue about if provoked, is after all not a thing in itself, but an intrinsic quality of the kind of language we use everyday, not without thought, but in place of thought, where thoughts will go when we have them, like shoe stretchers to be a little sillier then I intended when I sat down to tell you this very important fact, and if you’ve been paying attention, you will note, that makes this poetry.

Affordance: I Don’t Intend To Be Difficult

I’m a joiner. I like to fit in like a dove tail or other connective method of joining two things together which used to be separate. I’m still as large and noble as Patagonia. I’m not as expansive as Whitman, whom I admire without liking or really understanding, or as specific and entrenched as Frost whom I understand and admire and love dearly though not exclusively.

Speaking of love, I’d suggest a kiss, but I’m feeling rather stern and scratchy from not talking much lately. Were I to clear my throat in preparation for this kiss which is not likely to occur, most people, I’m talking the average sort of Joes and Janes who respond to surveys or who are caught like deer in headlights when you point the fucking camera in their face for all the world (or at least those who have sprung for cable) to see. I don’t like to stereotype but I believe firmly and whole heartedly to the extent that particular organ in my wind wracked body still functions in its abecedarian way as a pump and the locus or moment arm ( two terms about which I’m admittedly fuzzy) of all human motives ( and only humans have motives in the purest sense of the word in addition to opposable thumbs which everyone knows or the whole flex palmed thing which we use everyday without really thinking about unless it hurts us somehow) that in order to explain one thing it is necessary to understand something else.

This, some may recognize, is a page from my father’s very good book about how in order to do any job well one must purchase a new tool -- something strange and exotic, perhaps even archaic, like a hand drill or an auger. I’m still too young to really know what one would do with such a tool which I use metaphorically but my father meant in a concrete manner. He would build something with it. Rough-hewn, perhaps, but definite, something to point to, too heavy to lift perhaps and definitely prone to knocking against your shin.

In any case, I’m more of a gardener and less a carpenter. Tools are sort of beside the point in my principal occupation, which is, to state it simply, love, which I’ll define later, after turning over every rock in my garden searching for that which is plain and obvious, as the definitive transaction of the human condition. It is the thing.

Is this working for you? I meant working in the broadest sense of the term like the way lungs work when they are properly outfitted like wings in your chest, but you can define it however you must.

I don’t intend to be difficult but it is plain for all to see that we, by which I mean just you and I dear, are starting to reconsider that kiss.

Bounce

We haven’t talked about this enough you know. Not swept under the carpet or parked in the car port or docked in the porta-potty. It’s distasteful to use it and not speak of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for taboos ( I nearly wrote tattoos) but, and this, as it turns out, is a pretty big but, is a different matter all together ( I almost wrote horse of a different color but that always gets me thinking of marching to the beat of a different drummer which leads me into the whole punk wrock[sic, man it’s sick, as in perverse] thing and then, and only then, do I get tempted to kick some body’s ( oeuvre) fucking head in) But I digress.

To return to my point which I had hardly got started on before I forced me to traipse down the fucking garden path, I think the time has come for us all, and I do mean all of us, wall flowers, lurkers, and shiny bright stars -- all, to begin looking inside and I don’t mean via our navels either which are commonly called belly buttons and bellies often have a sort of rubber-like quality that comes from the constant, brutal and short starvation/satiation cycle that we , who are first and foremost ( I almost wrote foremast which I seem to recall is a very specific part of a ship), children of and parents of and stewards of a sort of dream remembered dimly and bouncy, bouncing, bounced – which as you will no doubt recall is a fairly distinctive quality of your average rubber ball.

The Secret Life of Rubber Balls

A little warm up. The hang dog expression I wore merely masked a belly ache. Merely is a funny word as it reminds me of the sea, which is anything but. My ass is dragon. My wagon is dragging. This drags on things. Drag is merely a property of objects that occurs to you when you throw them hard at something, like a window, but they don’t fly straight or true and, in fact, lose their impetus before they fulfill their special purpose --a purpose, in part, defined by your impetus.

What moves you? Some inner force, like the bounce bound up in a rubber ball? The child doesn’t make the ball bounce once -- not once or twice, the bounce doesn’t a child make. Never. In fact, not ever.

And I’m not reserving this for mere children, who are anything but. It’s impetus and purpose, symbolic action and the raw stuff like when you slap your hand hard down on a flat surface like a table or the fat part of your thigh and the air escaping from between your palm and the aforementioned flat surface makes a nice twacking sound that anyone in their right mind would recognize immediately as merely a bid for your very limited attention.