i'll drink anything
but i buy cheap canned beer
fix my mower
with a coat hanger
start and stop it with the choke
i wear second-hand clothes
till they're threadbare
my old lazy-boy scratch-post recliner
turned thirty-six this year
my grandmother bought it
three years before she died
i don't own
a cell phone
i'd rather piss and moan
about all the timely essential and
important bullshit i'm missing
in the back yard of the digital age
and just for the record
text is not a goddamn verb
fucked is
which is what i am
in this new school playing
on the new millennium field
although i think
i understand
why we don't live forever
some young fucker
(fuck! now there's a versatile fucking word)
would finally come unglued
and pound me out of existence
just to shut me up
put both of us out of our mutual miseries
long before i ever flipped
the calendar page to begin
another century
Poetry is a place for me to deal with me, warts and all. Why are the warts the most interesting? Well, I believe we live to put the best spin on everything. Because when it comes down to it, the warts, the flaws dominant our lives. We begin losing the day we are born, so it's no wonder if we live long enough, we turn into disgusted old bastards like the guy above (at least for the length of a poem)! The beauty of poetry or any art form is it can be whatever it wants to be to me, to you, to whomever picks it up and makes it theirs or tosses it aside. Art, and poetry, allow for it all: the masks, the heartbreak, the mania, the madness, all the continuing possibilities of us, of this. That's probably the main reason it bothers some people who only want the world to reflect what they want to see. Anyways . . .
One of the ways I see poetry is the way I take in the world which isn't always a clear narrative like the poem above. I like poems that work like my head works as I'm moving through the day, a continual onslaught of incoming and outgoing bullshit always interrupted by another distraction while forever thinking something significant at some point could happen, should happen if I'm ready for it, so I constantly try to pay attention. I think social media exploits our natural human instinct to continuously monitor our immediate surroundings, how we have survived for a million years. Don’t you think? Or maybe the significant thing has already happened, but we failed to pick up on it. Or maybe it moved into that other universe behind the green door, the one with Dr. Who and the blue piggy clones frozen stoned as my commitment to penning this poem disguised as prose that seems like a perfect hole for all we know and don’t know, the best window opened for a whiff of mother nature, the human soul, a good spot to dig and discover our next endeavor, haul it to the surface and examine our sons’ fathers’ bones and decide to bury them deeper when I unearth a spiral notebook scribbled in twenty years ago, the scrawl belonging to one of my sons musing on Twain’s riverboat days and Poe’s persistent obsession with death before he pivots onto that fawn we stumbled upon walking to Lost Lake, it lay curled in tall grass in the middle of the trail playing dead as its mother had told it to do in one of those Disney voices stuck in our heads, still-dead as the Good Lord Bird feather Ethan Hawke gave to me to contemplate John Brown and that otherworldly passion that is poetry or art or miscommunication (have it the way you want it) and not unlike the miracles of the natural world and the mysteries of the human heart, the history of all those Mississippi lynchings, no mystery to those days of hate and rage, maybe engage the memory of your first driving test in a friend’s ‘63 Ford Galaxie, parallel parking downtown with Armstrong steering, or the recollection of a hot summer afternoon parking in the woods and handed sweet-Jesus Heaven by an angel’s touch at sixteen, or maybe the terror of that unavoidable provocation when you were alone, beading sweat, beating heart, dry mouth, no way out, your voice choked and cracking fear as you shake off the shivers of considering what it would have been like being born black, or even being an immigrant in this racist trap that portrays itself as the land of the free, the greatest country in the history of the world, and I wonder about my grandparents’ broken brogues, muddy brogans and worn valises one hundred years ago arriving off the boat five thousand miles from home only to go five thousand feet below ground to blast and muck deep in a dark hole for the glory of the mansions on the hill to hand their children the promise of maybe a pair of Converse tennis shoes, the memory of the Columbia Gardens burning to the ground to make more room for the big mouth of the pit when the shafts played out. All that shit, a poem embraces it: Mother’s fresh cinnamon rolls out of the oven awaiting the spread of Philadelphia cream cheese sweetened with powdered sugar or Dylan insisting it’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe. It all comes and goes in a life in a poem, Don Juan and Carlos tripping to Santana’s guitar in a psilocybin dream, R.D. Laing sitting naked with a divided soul drawing a mural of their shit with their shit, neurons loaded with knotted, gnarly shit, the shit they were fed as children, those feces inspired messes of fractured art are okay if you’re okay with it or not because it’s always okay to be or not to be in a poem, okay to be the blank page or a protest song, maybe another crying-shame-full-confession of child abuse or sexual favors served up as a lifestyle choice by slave traders, sometimes explorations of secrets hidden deep in cobwebbed closets or unlit basement rooms, dark coal chutes, abandoned meat lockers, on dusty mattresses in garage attics home to bats and vampires and the devil-in-the-hole, or on those darkened killing floors in old B-movie horror films etched and bewitched in your dreams, that not-so-distant shore of Lake Who-the-Fuck-Knows, that roulette Hell, our remembered places where surprises await, and truth is probably hidden. Sometimes a poem is simply a letter:
David J. Spear photograph
Letter to Thomas from Helen
Dear Dave,
Why is it I wonder that most of the letters I actually get around to writing in this digital age often want to begin with the word “Sorry?” It’s like I want to apologize before I begin about the fact that I rarely write letters anymore, especially the handwritten ones addressed in an envelope stamped and mailed. That's a given of course, but the urge to apologize only arises from a known wrong, a dropping of the ball, missing a date, not holding up my end of an appointment I made which reminds me of those painful childhood confessions about breaking a window, getting caught by cops or busted at school, choking down a huge hunk of humble pie. Sending an apology note feels like proof (to myself) that I can still account for shit in a world that increasingly doesn’t seem to care a lot about showing up. It appears to me that most folks overbook their schedules and never think twice about altering their plans on an hourly basis. And as the world goes further down that immediate stimulation scenario, we old timers who've always lived on the calendar and the clock, get drawn more and more into the constant stimuli which only adds speed to the insane pace of our already aging lives, hurtling us faster toward the rear-end of that forever semi-trailer we’ve always been approaching way off in the distance on our highway of life and we keep closing in on as the planet spins. So I’m not as good as I was years ago when it comes to hitting the mark, making every date. Back then if you missed an appointment, it was probably the end of that engagement. Now I occasionally do drop the ball, and it becomes easier each time. I don’t feel as bad as I did the first few times it happened, but since I see most everybody doing it all the time, somehow I've become conditioned to these laid-back, new-world rules and given myself permission to feel good about of myself after the fact when I make the effort to write an apology letter like it’s a monumental gesture I should be applauded for. I’m never quite sure if it’s easier to shit your friends or to shit yourself.
Life is three quarters bullshit, minimum. What isn’t bullshit is that there is no one else I’d rather spend a couple of hours with bullshitting over a few beers than you. I decided to pull the last minute plug on doing that with you since I was feeling a little bit punky and I’m driving over to Seattle to see Sean in a few days. Since this goddamn pandemic bug is flying high again, I figured I’d avoid the public and try to lay low before I took off. I’m not worried about myself, but I don’t need to add fuel to this new bat-shit spiral of infections. I got the raunchy guts, fatigue, that muddled mind, a light headache—in general, no fever but just not up to snuff. The kind of thing that never stopped me from going to work in the past, but that was back before viruses were literally killing thousands of people. So I chose to stay home, stand you up, and try not to spread what I’ve got if what I’ve got is what no one wants to get and add to the danger for those folks who can’t get the vaccine, mainly kids. Those who have chosen not to be vaccinated have chosen their particular fate. I wish them luck choosing the virus over the vaccine. As for those noisy, arrogant, know-it-all assholes, all I wish for them is to stay the fuck away from me and enjoy their triumphs and miseries they’ve invested their lives in.
So here I sit drinking canned beer and writing the same old shit that I’m fucking tired of saying, but the worst part of it is not hearing your voice, sharing a laugh, shaking our heads and raising a glass together, agreeing that all we can do is keep doing what we do, that there’s nothing we can do about stupid. Like another old friend of mine said: ignorance is a condition, one that can change as a result of experience and education, but stupidity is a commitment, you have to work really hard to achieve and maintain being stupid. How did we wind up in this golden (spray painted) age of ascending and over-achieving stupidity? I tell myself to let it go. Instead I'll imagine you pulling your pocket notebook out while I signal the bartender for another round as you read me your latest poem scribbled on a recent afternoon stroll close to the river, the senses, the flora and fauna there, and where someone or some place I know will appear clearly to me (whether I actually do or don’t know the subject of the poem). I do miss sharing those possible moments with you. So I am truly sorry to have missed you today, man. I look forward to catching up soon. Till then keep on walking and talking on the page.
Yer (predictably unpredictable) pal,
Mark
Wonderful!
Damn good...