1. Wake up remembering where you are. 2. On his first day the kid makes a killing at his lemonade stand. 3. Send him warm thoughts.
I’ve decided on “nothing.” It’s the best way to describe what I’m doing here. A dead bird comes, and I want to talk about it, sailing in and through the window, new glass stabbing down in falls over the edge and to the bottom where there is floor. Everyone has to look up or look away while this business of nothing is going on. Who likes it, to be disturbed in the middle of their business? No one. Definitions, for me, only clot and road block. I could just be confused, but even the most confused have to breathe and win bread, earn their keep. If it’s in me to write, but you ask about what, I’d rather give no answer, because each day I’m struggling for one myself. Why give you an easy answer if the answers don’t come that easy?
Instead this paragraph can say it. One day I’ll have a big book to hand out – I’ll be practiced, I keep telling myself. I’ve learned I don’t want to be confined by one genre alone – such as fiction. I’m better off writing about this poor nothing world in limited, homely sentences. And on the side I can venture into those fictions.
he speaks for five minutes
exactly what he’s thinking.
there is no timidity in the
way he carries himself.
a little world of conversations
for his victims and by the end
they’re signing papers.
the others wear clothes old into the years and
desperation is a constant perspiration letting everyone know that they’re being driven beyond their natural means, that they’re willing to go to great lengths, cross lines, ruin other men, forsake the gods that had forsaken them, for a living.
There is just so much out there in terms of information. It can be really intimidating for a writer to think about that. Why would they read my stuff? In the next split second I have to obliterate that and move on. Otherwise it’s all through.
Perhaps we will be taken out into the back alley and have our fucking heads blown off by someone who broke into the house while we were gone. What if I were to survive it? What would I write about then? Christopher Reeve comes to mind, how he has since changed being forced into his paralysis, how he has communicated and reached out with new ideas. They closed their eyes and sent him good thoughts. We each speak from our own perspectives and beat downs. And again, our suffering may not be comparable to the suffering of others. Suffering is not a matter of pride. Let something else make you warm.
I think of myself as sophomore; not quite naïve as freshman, but on the lower rungs of what I need to know to get through to that next level. All the selfishness, jealousy, and fear. Some of it I feel the weight on me. Tonight I want to produce a fleet that will kill it off.
they misunderstood each other and
were not willing to repair what had been said
it was the end of all things in their long terms
meditation and a stillness
and a movement
in front of the closed eyes
trust the world one day
to come along
and pull out that flag security
blanket right from under you
I really like this. Coming here to write. If I were to be pulled away from it, I’d really miss it. There’s nothing else like writing that I feel so close to. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to do, even if I’m feeling quiet and think I don’t have that much to say. Often when I get in bed and plan to go to sleep for the night, I wind up pulling my notebook in with me, swiping across thick, black lines. Poems of my day, my job, or now no job, and no job in sight. The vacationer.
My destiny continues to unfold. I’m along for the ride. I’m under the truck getting my back scraped against the highway. In the air floating, eyeing the drama from a high place, laughing, light hearted and letting go, like I did with my job. They were letting go of me the same time I was letting go. Maybe it all works out way – in the very, very end.
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