The Moment When I was a kid and relatives came to stay, I got booted from my bed, had to sleep in the living room on a stiff, under-stuffed corduroy chair, its arms wide as end tables. The ratchet chair-back folded down to make a single bed with the large ottoman, but if I got too high on the head-end of the beast it would dump me onto the floor—which was fun, of course, when I “wanted” it that way. Its pattern made a deep impression on me, a rough texture that left its mark on my skin. It wasn't a comfortable chair, but years later it provided a magical moment that altered my life—that first time I believed I'd written a real poem: Passing the Time in a Green Corduroy Arm Chair listening to the uninterrupted hum of the refrigerator, the occasional car door slamming outside, and waiting for your return. I didn't know much about poetry then, but I “felt” this was a poem. I knew it was truly “me” yet more than myself, something beyond just my thoughts. It was the awareness that I could write words on paper like I'd read in books, words that spoke for all of us, and I wanted to do it again, which has led me here with you fifty odd years later: passing the time writing on an acer laptop, listening to the tinnitus ringing in my ears, the intermittent rumbling of planes overhead, and I'm still waiting for your return.
I found this in the hard-drive slush pile of my laptop. I remember that day vividly, that apartment in Parkside Village. It was brand new in 1973. I’d been scribbling down words and reading books of poetry for a couple of years and wondering if I would ever write something someone else would call poetry. I didn’t give it too much thought back then, but I really wanted that because I truly believed I was a poet. It was inside me trying to get out. Is that what they meant when they referred to “a calling?” I wasn’t sure how to describe what I felt, but I loved the liberation of doing it, of writing these little pieces of language that looked cool on the page and often packed a punch that took my breath away. So it didn’t matter to me if what I was doing was “real” poetry or not.
There seemed to be so much judgement about what “poetry” was (or most things for that matter) and those who owned the authority I believed were tucked away in the ivory towers of academia. But that day I sat in the dim apartment waiting for my poem to arrive, I just decided to open my senses to that moment (sitting in that old chair I’d dug out of the shed behind my parents house because we needed some furniture) and after observing and listening for a little while, a feeling came over me, call it loneliness, call it melancholy, call it the poet’s playground, but in that moment of feeling the feeling I had for my new wife, old girlfriend, the love of my life, I new I had a poem, a “real” fucking poem, one I’d be proud to show someone I didn’t know. So here you go.
I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to monetizing this space. A big part of my problem is that old “daze work for a day’s pay” concept we’ve all grown up with. If I’m going to ask for money, that means I’ve got to produce: chop, chop! I feel obliged to go to work, put in the shift, get ‘er done. That “obligation” doesn’t exist in my world of poetry. That’s why I love it! Poetry is freedom for me. “The Shit” only happens when the muse moves the poet to make, create, spake! Thus, I continue to show up here whenever that’s the case, and I thank those of you out there who have means and desire to support my poetry habit. And while I can write prose, string a few sentences together, so far over seven decades, that feels like a job to me. So I will let you go till next time. I hope you enjoy these musings. Your reward is a little poem for the road! Peace. Enjoy the spring!
Getting Out Get out. Get off your butt! Change it up, the same old routine, that spin you're in. Take a trip outside yourself. Try it on the ground, on foot, stop and smell. Follow the bird calls, the coyote scat, the badger (or bear) holes dug under tree roots, logs, and rocks. Check out the bear grass (noses?) Doug Fir bough tips, lime-green new growth lit up like Christmas. Listen to the trickling spring meandering into flowing brookly streams building volume, forming pools, then tumbling down the draw, that mini-roar sound of rushing water in the distance. And when you stop to listen . . . you hear your own breathing, your heart thumping from walking up hill, your effort to get higher because that's where you want to be, where you need to go to be alone, together, on the planet in your head aware of this space, the place you perceive. Doesn't it always reveal something new to you? If not, does it show you what you'd forgot? The turtle head rock, dragon-wind driftwood on a mountain top, its skin topo-map ringed. If you wait till evening, the coyote sings crow chatter and banshee tunes. What do you make of it? You know that's the gist of this, or maybe what can't be made of it. What can be done? Where do you come from? Not that it helps you in the going but might make the going easier. What's the point of going or not going all the way? Can you make more than what you make of it? Isn't that what art is? By definition (an explanation we make up) poetry is making. Your life was made literally by making love. Does that make love life? Go. Go. Go! Keep going! Go until you come! Go. Make it, your life, this art, this love. DEPART! Seek art. Make it up. Go for it and you'll find it unless it finds you first because it will find you like Death which found you today. They had to check in, let you know they'd taken another of your old friends, one they had visited before a number of times—when they came for both his wives and three of his sons before he turned sixty-four. Will you still need me, will you still feed me is a question Death doesn't bother with. They just keep singing, Next! Keep showing up for each and all of us. They are the ultimate artist, always recreating you-us in the ongoing spin. Death is art, is life, is you are them. Go find it. Get out. Get on. Get ready. Get in. Sing your song. Ignore them, let 'em wait. Now it's time to begin. Mark Gibbons
your "first poem" brought me to tears. granted, that's often not hard to do. 😉
but it tugged at me, hit me, hugged me.,
thanks ! like Nan said, "Don't stop."
Thank god. Thank Goodness. Don't stop.