Sunday Summer Morning Farewell to the Backyard of My Heart If that's too sentimental for you, don't waste your time reading this. Though I'd like to know what life is to you or anyone beyond a seemingly Extended goodbye, this series of leavings each day, feeling our way to the exit. All I know to do is savor the steps, the stimuli my vessel allows me, each Heartbeat, the variety of birdsong in the early hours of the day, music lilting from the band-shell in the park a block away, a light breeze teasing The maple leaves, the bright cone-laden top of the Spruce tree, sunlight reflecting off the back of the yellow house, an Eden naked humans desire, and that smell—I'll Call it Chlorophyll (for want of a better word, challenged by my olfactory allergies). I am a lover of mornings outside in all seasons and always in this place, but in particular, Summer mornings I've lived to celebrate. For me they've held the magic of existence— the fawn bedded on the lawn—my own garden illusion of paradise, eternity, briefly, again.
Hello, I am still alive. The lull in posts here is the result of many complications, not the least of which are my doubts right from the get-go about keeping this blog-ball rolling. The idea of doing a column, some kind of regular prose blather, and imagining people might be interested (nay, thrilled!) in reading my thoughts, observations, and self-involved musings weekly, and that after six months to a year of it would be happy to pay for said writings, was something I was a bit more than skeptical about. But since a friend of mine had pulled it off and was collecting “real coin,” I thought I’d give it a whirl.
The first few months were okay, but it was like work, something I had to force myself to schedule, which was different than my writing practice as a poet. Day jobs, necessary chores, even unscheduled interruptions have never been problems for this poet. Living life has always come first. Thinking and writing about it naturally follows. You do what needs to be done. Then when the poem whispers or screams for you to listen up, to sit down and write, you find and make the time to chase it and pin it to the page. Then you go right back to doing that other shit that begs your attention.
The idea of asking a subscriber for money demands a commitment to delivering a service or product. I know that world, have struck that bargain all my life. If you pay for a subscription, there better be a fucking package arriving on time! What I love about poetry is that it has no monetary value. Being a poet, I have avoided asking for paid subscriptions because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hold up my end . . . and the last few months have proved me right. I’m a fucking poet. You can only trust me to spew for free the jizz of my soul and my infected (sometimes inspired) mind, only occasionally offering a paper collection of those ravings for the price of a low-end meal or a short Uber ride.
When I realized that a poet’s job was to say “fuck” to power, conventions, and expectations (along with just saying “fuck” as often as needed or desired) I knew I was truly a poet. Before I’d figured that out, I always felt unworthy. How could I even think of myself as a poet? The poetry I’d experienced in school or heard recited at public events, that “real poetry,” was elegant, educated, lofty, way above me, too distinguished for me (and the gritting shit in my head and heart). It was serious stuff, polite, not offensive, and never threatened power directly, didn’t seem to do much “directly.” Then the sixties happened. And school kids in rural America were exposed to the beats, the blacks, angry women and pissed-off Indians. People started saying no to power, no to war, and poetry was at the forefront. It pushed the limits of polite society, it talked back to conformity. Poetry became the voice of honest human experience. It was a place for flawed, fragile, angry, horny people to be themselves, to be scared and funny and heartbroken and stoned. It became a space where people could speak their desires for freedom, empathy, and compassion, where they could scream their fears, their selfishness, their urge to strike out, feed their hungers, contemplate their own demise, and what it might be like to kill.
What better way to expose human complexity and contradiction, the individual, than through language personally composed? Poetry. We are all capable of doing that. We are all poets whether we exercise it or not. The greatest tools for thinking are living, reading, and writing. The mind needs exercise like the body. That’s key: getting off our metaphorical asses and “just doing it.” Charles Bukowski, one of our most prolific, offensive, and painfully human poets, wrote his own epitath: Don’t Try. I like that better than “Just Do It,” but the directions are similar (with possibly different comic undertones): “Act (don’t fucking whine about it).”
If people want to pay for your action, congratulations! I figured out a long time back that my poetry wouldn’t pay my bills. Yet it did set me free, the writing of it and the knowledge that others had read it. Once I started putting my bullshit out there, airing my dirty, bloody, chicken-shit-holy lingo-laundry, the vulnerable unrealities I composed in my head and hung on the balcony of my narcissistic self, added other peoples’ lies and made more stuff up, I cared less about what I thought other people thought of me. I was less afraid. Opening up, honestly being you, making mistakes, will set you free. Poetry allows you to do that. And what’s the worst that can happen? You die? Well, you are going to die. That is going to happen. So fuck it! Be yourself. Be who and whatever you want to be. Live freely until you die. “Don’t try,” be. Be a human, a poet . . . whether you write or not.
Wow! Look at that. A little pep talk to myself (and maybe sombody who took the time to read it). Hope you thought a few thoughts, started a few poems while you were reading. I also hope this effort to “act,” getting off my metaphorical ass, the one I’m literally sitting on now, will be a reboot for me, sidelined for a couple months. My mind a hurricane. Been living out of a suitcase and grieving the death of my residence for the last quarter century. Maybe I’ll find a way of dealing with that in my next outing here, Marking My Words. What else am I going to do? Till then, here’s a poem to chew on. Write on. Peace.
Soul Food Is literature a luxury of leisure? Does the Communist Manifesto qualify as literature? Why? And what about the ravings of Charles Bukowski? Who are the dilettantes of diatribe, the rascals of repartee? Is there a bare-knuckled Hemingway drinking cheap wine on the right hook of violent America? Ask me if I give a fuck about beauty today. The perfect words elude me as I try to say how it feels to be evicted, forced out of your home . . . Familiarity. No words come to me, only hissing reptilian whispers, the guttural growls of humanoid predators, inarticulate speech—can we call it poetry? These times seem ripe for outrage, resistance, refusal to walk away, a stripping down to the panicked choices of hate and fear. A chorus of angry voices Spinning their tales and chanting their songs, professing they know how to create a better world. Pick up my book, I'll show you how it can't be done. Failure is not an option. It is a flat out guarantee. When you're working constantly to feed your addictions, those hypnotic distractions designed to gobble up your Shrinking “leisure” time, keep you doing and buying all they want you to find, there is no room for windows or doors— dreams or souls. No place for your Mythology in a production economy. So if the soul exists and literature feeds it, a diet of drama and poetry, it's gotta be starving, drunk on cigarettes and beer. Mark Gibbons
Thank you. I’m so sorry about this unexpected change… it must feel like an ambush. I lived in a house once years ago, a sweet 1913 craftsman bungalow on Gower Street in the city of angels. We sold it (long story) and to this day it is the one house I mourn. I can still close my eyes and walk through every room of that house. My kids were born there. We brought that house back to life and the light was like nowhere else. It’s part of me still.
Good stuff. Thanks for posting. Been a while.