Hello, Neighbors. No man is an island. Even though many want to believe they are. We’re stuck with each other. Granted I do my best to avoid and ignore a whole lot of you assholes, but we’re all here. So that makes us neighbors. We do our best to get along. Growing up in a dinky town I learned that I had to live with everyone there. We worked at putting up with one another and walking away, minding our own business, live and let live. We knew we needed each other at different times, and that we could run but we couldn’t hide. Things wouldn’t just go away. Arrivals and departures were rare. So we learned how to love and hate our neighbors. We learned how to tolerate and appreciate one another. And in a way I think of this “leetle column” (that we show up for infrequently) as a neighborly endeavor. The beauty of “this bullshit” over the backyard fence is that you don’t have to stand there and listen unless you want to.
I don’t know why I thought that I’d be any good at writing a regular prose piece littered with poems, but I saw a friend of mine doing it and making money at it. Well, money has always intrigued me for obvious reasons: mainly because it was necessary and hard to come by. Usually I had to work my ass off for it, and it never seemed to be enough. So if I could get paid for doing what I liked to do most, namely staring at anything and nothing, talking to myself and thinking, just “being” lazy, this would be the answer to my endless monetary nightmare. Ha! As Dick Hugo said: human beings are funny goddamn animals!
But since my pal was pulling it off, I thought I’d give it a shot, forgetting that fatal flaw of not being any good at selling anything, leastwise myself, and even worse at asking for things. So I began posting poems and pecking out some often inappropriate and off-color verbal-jizz. I did this for free for a year or two before I worked up the courage to tell folks they could pay anything they’d like if they could afford it or wanted to contribute, and several of you were kind (and flush) enough to toss some coin at this nonsense. After all, it’s all nonsense isn’t it? What else is there to do with our money? Besides food and shelter, the rest is nonsense until we disappear.
I like posting my thoughts and hearing from those who enjoy reading them, but I’m not a business mind. I don’t give two fucks about “growing my business.” And that’s how writers doing this make money: numbers. “It’s all about numbers” could be the defining title of our social and economic history. Because if you’re not playing the numbers game, taking care of business, you are putting an undue strain on your contributing neighbors. In this case all 18 of you. Holy shit! Now the GUILT-factor red-light is flashing "WAKE THE FUCK UP!” This is not sustainable, friends and neighbors, in this form. And you know how I love those tried and true clichés: old dogs, new tricks; a day’s work for a day’s pay; you get what you pay for? You get it. Not that I ever could have been, but I’m most likely not going to become an entrepreneur at this age.
What I know how to do is treat it like a day job, and thankfully one where I don’t have to show up every day. So I put myself on (my) schedule, shoot to hit those marks, watch the clock, all those habits (instincts?) I’ve lived by over the entirety of my existence. Maybe some of you love that obsessive/compulsive mindset that capitalism has trained us to adopt like Pavlovian dogs, but I’ve hated it all my life. Monday mornings! I hated going to school because of the schedule. I hated Sundays! Our Biblical “day of rest?” Sundays were always a melancholy bummer for me. Learning, investigating, and creating: all the things that make our time here interesting, were put on the clock, on a schedule, that Henry Ford assembly line. We have spent our lives being groomed to serve on that line to survive.
When I figured this out about myself, knew I couldn’t screw myself up to the idea of really making some money, I thought the only thing for me was poetry. It’s the lazy man’s paradise! And since there’s absolutely no money in it, IT’S INCORUPTABLE! If the profiteers don’t care about it, I can do, say, make up whatever pops into my head, spew whatever I want to scribble down. And when I realized the poet’s job was to say “fuck you” to power and expectation and to say it as often as needed as desired, I flat-out KNEW I was a poet! And while most of the poets I’d read in school seemed too smart and tame for me, I still liked what they did on paper, so I kept reading more and more. What I discovered was that poets wrote their truth: they were saints and assholes alike. Society just pulled out the saintly verse for those generic public occasions. The rest of the time we found poems written by flawed and fragile creatures afraid of death and happy to be alive, hungry and horny and wild. Poems full of compassion and empathy, jealousy and selfishness. We are capable of sacrifice and murder, messy minds, as unpredictable and stubborn as we are unshakeable in our love and loyalty. And we all know we really don’t know shit.
What better way to expose that complex and contradictory persona, than through poetry? Everyone is capable of making poetry because we are all human beings. Everyone is a poet whether they exercise it or not. Charles Bukowski’s epitaph is “Don’t Try.” I like that better than “Just Do It!” because it’s got that “you stupid fuck” edge to it. It pushes back on the whole system as opposed to joining the capitalist team. The underlying message seems to be the same: ACT. So here you go, another blathering show, another confession of what I don’t know. Maybe next time, I’ll come up with some fascinating dope that will blow your minds. Heh-heh. Or maybe just a running account of how I entertained myself that week. Whatever will be will be. More airing of my dirty-holy-chickenshit-angry-bloody-fucking laundry from the balcony, add yours to it, maybe make some shit up, put some words out there, set them free. It always sort of feels like it sets me free. Why not? What’s the worst that could happen. We’re going to die, all of us, soon (or sooner than we think) so I say, “Fuck it! Be yourself.” And laugh. This life is absurd. It’s a joke because we don’t know anything, yet we keep telling ourselves we do! That’s pretty funny really.
So we do what we like to do, and don’t take anything too seriously. I am expecting to see a chapbook soon, Cross Country, from Bottlecap Press. That’s cool, and I’m hoping have a new collection of poems from FootHills Publishing available in September titled Sister Buffalo. I’ll have more on that soon. Till then, stay cool!
A poem from Sister Buffalo.
The Glass warps our reflections we keep on eating more or less drinking more sleeping less paying attention to the dirty truth the word success dancing to the tick talk of the wind the prattle chatter of animal wisdom a party line on the food chain gang-link-saw slave to the clock consciousness of all lost in the march woods of time gray blues the jazz we can't find let alone explain articulate again we steal who we smear chew those sounds sustained to complain make sacred the profane and smile when the glass shatters then cup your hands sip the dark light mystery of breathing in here again where we still linger like garlic sliver or thorn remnant shards here ungone
Penny for your thoughts. My two cents. Don't take any wooden nickels. Sucker turns on a dime. Shave and a haircut...two bits. All that and still nothing foldable to fatten your wallet except maybe a poem or two. Fuck it. At least it's currency you can count on. It may even hold its value over time, and if it doesn't, you can always print more. Peace
Butterfly Herbs?