Why I Write, Part x+25: Wannabe

I want to be
In poetry,
Not so much as
A business,
But to give words
Force with timed finesse

I want to be
A little muse-y,
Both to inspire
and to demand
Creative works
From now-changed hands.

I want to be
An intermediary,
One who knows
The Muse's call,
Who frees the muse
Within us all.

I don't need to be remembered,
Just noticed while I'm there.

Why, Again?

Why do they need a hundred pop songs
To say the same thing, such a bore,
And why do all my poems
Seem to say so little more?

Why is coffee the only thing I can smell?
No, really, what the hell?
Why does the wind blow?
Why does the grass grow?
Why are questions the answers I best know?

Why is she completely open
In such an airy way?
Why does it have to feel so wrong
To have something more to say?

When the question could offend,
Why must I always ask her?
Why does the weekend leave so fast,
But my foot stay in my mouth forever?

Wet Paint

Our young love is like wet paint:
Always tacky, always sticky.
It colors every one or thing around it,
Yet washes off so easily.

To Buy, To Die

A louse, a mouse,
A loon, a goose:
A white man is not hung, and yet
He wears a noose.

To buy, to die,
To bow, to be:
Can anyone be so confined
and Still be free?

Crying Clown (A "poem-in-dialog")

"How could she do that?  I hate her!  I'll get her!
I'll make her rue the day she left, and then forget her."

"Why don't you write that on a page;
Let fire seal that letter.
If she can't see how bad you're hurt,
Wouldn't that be better?"

"Be half a man and take this lying down?
Be king of wimps, with two horns for a crown?
Be nothing but a tear-stained, crying clown?
Forget all that, I'm taking her ass down."

"What gives, man?  Are you playing?"

"Have you listened to a word I'm saying?

I've tried so hard to tell.
Guess I'll have to yell now!
I'm hunting with my hounds of hell,
Out of patience, out for blood now."

"You can't move forward stuck on her.
You can only lose, then.
Your hounds, the beast called anger,
They stay because you feed them."

Cycle of Life

Someone's daughter
Doesn't see
What I see in her.

The key to building confidence
Is to hammer together evidence:
Counter beauty's violent construct
With words which in its walls I struck.

Of mouths and minds, and how they dance,
Of movement's forms that me entrance
Of seas' great depths within her eyes
(and other poets' honest lies),

Or why I love her.
Once she knows,
Then she goes.
I'll find another.

One Story

It's always she, or always I.
There's always a reason why,
Always a story.
They all end gory.

Might end with me in hell,
But I always tell.
(Or if I don't, you ask,
Keep me on task).

Her tastes are too pricy
To be so cheap.
She had the legs
But I don't have the eggs.

Guts fueled with ale,
Then lower I failed.
There was a headache
Or a flirt-fake.

How long does it take
A fiction to bake?

It's always one story
Or another.
(That's the excuse
I gave your mother.)

Numbers

Age is not a number.
It's an excuse, a reason why.
"No wonder he cries,
He's just a baby."
(Well, maybe)

It's a relative weight of worries.
In life, they come in droughts or flurries.
Weight, as well as cares,
We're losing or gaining as long as we're there.

Age is a peculiar procession of people,
The living and the ghosts.
(I'm not sure which haunt us the most)
Out of turn, they would mean nothing.
They are our shackles and our wings.

Age is a toggle-switch
Feeling in your bones
That you'll always or never be alone.
(If the temperature feels wrong
Now that you're in it,
Wait five minutes.)

Age is knowing the way out of hell,
But having no one to tell.

Age is a long awakening
From a restless slumber.
You can't count that in numbers.

The One Who Goes Without

Too soft to rest his hardness,
Embracing like a climbing harness,
Admits no weakness, and all doubt
(But with a laugh and not a pout):
The One Who Goes Without.

The One Who Goes Without
Goes within.
Then late, at home,
All alone,
Relives his sin.

Poignards

Every word cuts and bleeds,
As I flail everyone around me,
'Til wisdom dulls me down to size.
For this, I apologize.

Against high walls' boards,
Monoliths of culture, institution,
Humor's neon notes mark my words;
Cutting knife-words turn to pins.

Go unobserved, and points turn inward.
What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

Resume (Applicant's Disguise)

I'm not over, but we're done.
I forget when stuff means something.
I'm too old to be so young
At this macrocultural seduction.
For two hundred years,
We've been sleeping with
This mythical capitalist.
Who I am, a resume
Who may exist,
May, if you ask, cease and desist,
Navigating the maze, the lies,
Behind an applicant's disguise;
May go nowhere and be the first.

I have not the endowment
To slake your thirst.

Get

Wherever I go
I don't get anywhere.
The best thing about me,
The worst thing about me:
I'll always take "no" for an answer.

It's There

I'm there when a party won't cover your joy,
When the world is your oyster and fate backs your ploy,
When you lose your girl, and you lose your nerve,
When you ain't got shit, and it's more than you deserve.

I'll always be there, so never fear.



You just gotta love beer.

Thirst for Knowledge

I don't "thirst for knowledge,"
I hunger.

I won't be satisfied by
Thin, dribbling streams
Of economists' fantasies
and theorists' dreams.

I don't want something inoffensive,
Only what the bland can't make sense of.

I don't want something you hold
In a glass and half see through.
I want knowledge thick enough
To sink my teeth into.

Healthy

I see the venerable old masters,
Struggling goldsmiths of words,
I have heard paranoid, unknowable ravings.
Wild eyes, wild words, protect the brain's savings,
and I see the genius,
and I see the illness.

Then I look at myself,
See what's not by anyone else:
The ideas in dimensions divine by absurd,
Conceived in secret grace, so awkward
In words,
See the things I say, think, cannot make right,
Foul words I use, wishes someone might die,
A tongue digging graves that might make mountains fly,
and I see the genius
and I see the illness.

and I see
That I've never been, will never be
Healthy,
Only sick differently.

Opposition

I think
I stand
In opposition
To culture's enforced, infectious submission
To so many destructive acts of creation.

I think I oppose,
But you say I support,
For everyone goes.
It's our final resort.

When You Awaken

Forsaken,
Seat taken,
Finding your bed
Unshared when you awaken.
Alone,
You moan,
Head abuzz, sitting
Beside your silent phone.
Are you a fool,
Or I a fink?
Don't feel or think.
It makes your stomach sink.

You never stand where you think.