“If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill! Kill! let there be fresh meat . . .

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.”

- William Carlos Williams

“There’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one.”

- The Brothers Bloom

So this is it, the last in my little poetry experiment. My tangent. It was kinda nice to change it up around here a little bit, search in the closet for some skeletons to fly on the flagstaff. What a rush.

What I like so much about writing are the surprises. I never initially intended to write warm-up acts to the poems I posted, disclaimers or parables or anything. That wasn’t the plan. Honestly, I was just trying to fill in the gaps. But I did want to set each one up somehow, with a date and maybe a tiny hint at each’s context. That seed eventually grew into all the pre-poem mini-narratives and analyses you see in the 6 posts below–which, I’ll admit, sometimes felt a little indulgent or self-serving but, let’s just be honest, this is a blog. Can it really be anything but indulgent? Really, cards on the table, who am I kidding?

But it’s the surprise part I like, how one sentence can sometimes open a floodgate and give birth to this whole other…thing. I love getting lost in the process. Other times, though, I’m suspicious of it, especially when I hear people talk about writing as catharsis. The method, they say, helps them put things into perspective, and then I wonder whether that perspective is a product of the creative “birthing” process, some kind of hidden peace or clarity coming out through the spontaneity of words on paper, or if it was the goal all along. And if it was the goal, is there really anything spontaneous about it? It’s closing your eyes before going from Point A to Point B …then acting surprised when you get there.

At some point I started wondering what writing really was, even started resenting it. With the right kind of prose, couldn’t anything look 20/20? How much of these interpretations do we control? What’s real and what’s rationalized, “sorted out,” tidied? Is writing just a tangible, more articulate way of lying to ourselves?

Then it happened. I was driving on the highway when all of sudden it’s bumper to bumper. Dead stop. And I see smoke in the distance.

When I get to the source I find a camper, one of those older, smaller RVs, completely engulfed in flames. And close, right there, on the shoulder. It must have just happened but there was nobody standing anywhere near it, no shocked or scared or breathless owner staring at what could have been his plastic-panelled surrogate for a coffin. There were no cops around, no sirens, only heat and the dull, rippling growl of something important burning.

We were helpless, all of us in our cars craning our necks and calling 911. Who knows, the camper could’ve been abandoned. It could have been left on the side of the road days ago because its engine gave out and then–it’s impossible to know–maybe the wiring was old and it sparked and started the fire. But then, maybe it happened while driving, while people were driving it, some kind of panicked explosion at 80mph.

This is exactly what I was talking about. How horrible. What an ugly, terrible, awful way that would be to go out, burning alive in a 25-year-old camper that probably hadn’t been washed or cleaned in God knows when. I wondered if there was a way to dress it up–to eulogize it.

I wondered if there was a way to make something like that beautiful.

I’m not sure that was accomplished with this piece but it’s what I was going for. You get the point. I think there’s something to said for the footprints words leave, how they’re often heavier than the actual foot leaving them. What we choose to say or post on our blogs, how we say it, what we withhold. That’s kinda what this poetry thing was all about. That’s completely what this blog thing is about. I think there’s something to be said for saying.

This one’s from April 7, 2009. It’s called “Prettier to Think in Metaphor.”

Prettier to Think in Metaphor

Fire,
just like you see in the movies,
barreled from a camper’s windshield
and reached greedily for the sky.
I felt its heat through the windows.

Arms of black smoke fanned the cloudbursts,
pushed through them turning light
to shadow, staining it
like the confused eyes of night
pulling up the cover of day and
coming out too soon.

It was a hunk of metal, glass and old rubber,
a fallen comet, a blur of home
that maybe sped too fast, laughed too loudly or touched too much.
It stood there still and half-dead
watching all the people on their cell phones,
watching them call for help.
It stood as though its back were straight,
as though it were regretless, and wanted to burn.

Inside were probably unmade beds and empty boxes of cereal,
maybe even people
on their way to something, something
new and different. I’d like to imagine
them singing, a whole family to their favorite record.
Dad drummed on the wheel while the others
made a harmony. Then they each stopped
to laugh, shake their heads and smile.
And for less than a second, the world felt humbled
and imperfect.

Then the moment sucked them in
through black smoke and embers,
time froze, the earth stopped spinning,
and they rose upward toward the sky,
sideways with the clouds toward the horizon,
never looking down at the lives they left
on the side of an old and broken highway,
in the middle of it,
between where they were and where they were going.

In college I had this ongoing joke with a girl I shared a couple of writing workshops with. My pieces, they were always wordy and introspective. I liked the technique of telling about a half-page’s worth of action, then expounding on it for next 3, analyzing it, exaggerating it. Action, commentary, action, action, commentary–that structure didn’t do it for me. I wanted 90% commentary–all commentary. How else could I really get at the double consciousness thing I was going for? The idea that everything is two-sided, love and hate, rational and irrational, emotion and logic, and that each side is fully aware of the other. How else than to make my lusts into obsessions and my doubts into pure dreads could I really nail it? I think what I was going for most was avoiding definition. I didn’t want my characters to come to revelations; no epiphanies or morals; I didn’t want arcs to peak and then resolve. I wanted something a little more… blah. Something blurry and real.

Anyway, the joke, if you want to call it that, was that this girl would call me a romantic after each new piece of mine she read. And I’d laugh and look down and say, “No… What? No way. A cynic–if anything–but not a romantic.” And this was our thing. She’d smirk, say that it was sweet, and I’d blush, and say she didn’t get it.

What’s funny in all this is just how quickly after graduation I began to see things differently. Yeah, okay, I am a romantic. And yes, I’m also a cynic. It was the whole idea of everything I was writing at the time–the one theme I kept coming back to and trying to get right–and I was never even able to just admit this to myself, as if the word alone–”romantic”–made me into a sucker, naive or pathetic somehow. I still thought of “jadedness” as a badge that you wear or a mark of maturity, instead of a disease, a cancer you treat in stages. It defines you the same that it means absolutely nothing. It is possible to love and lose, and then be angry, and then be messed up for long time, and still one day get out of the shower, look yourself in the mirror and understand that the fog around you isn’t all heavy or all light but rather a million shades and slivers of everything, some parts cold and others warm, some sharp, others soft. If we do it right, the fog should be a crowded, directionless mist of honesty, not necessarily changing our reflection, just aging it a bit.

So I guess the best way to introduce this poem would be to say that it’s from before this “revelation,” if you want to call it that, happened. It’s still searching for extremes, in a way yearning for them, but it’s detached and aware enough to get that they only exist now in flashes–just not enough so to totally accept that. …I think.

This one’s from March 26, 2009. It’s called “Antique Soundscapes.”

Antique Soundscapes

A record spins on a turntable,
pouring the most delicate music
into the soundless sky below my ceiling—
where everything is, where my thoughts are,
where your exhausted ghost is,
growing as tired of holding onto me
as I am of carrying it.

But this song
reminds me of you.
In its static I hear your whisper, floating
over me like smoke, a gentle kiss on the neck,
leaning in like a secret
and saying: “Somewhere,
maybe only in dreams, I still love you.
We’re still the sky
and music
and all things soft and beautiful.
Close your eyes. Drift away with me….”

But now dust greys the cover
like a stale morning dew
and this room is too small, its ceilings too low
to fit any more sound inside.
Not even a hum could squeeze through this fragile air,
not without tearing it.
So I move closer to the spinning sound,
closer to the scratching,
and hold my hands before it feeling for your flame,
feeling for anything
in it that might burn like warmth.

We’re in there somewhere,
in the somewhere that static goes when the music’s over.
We’re the anti-silence of a record’s end,
the way it cries and crackles,
spinning on long after the melody has faded—
and never fast enough to make a fire.

“Half of what I say is meaning less
But I say it just to reach you”
-The Beatles

Every now and then something happens and the air around you gets heavy. Nothing changes in these moments–things look the same, smell the same, even kind of feel the same–but you know that whatever is going on in those few seconds when time slows down is important, representative of something bigger. You usually don’t know how or why, but instead of just passing, these moments present themselves to you, stop dead in their tracks as if to tap you on the shoulder or wrap themselves around you. “Something’s happening here,” these moments whisper in your ear. “Are you paying attention?”

Times like these, I think, are what poems are made of.

I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about. The blog, all the words and pictures and poems and theories, it’s all spackle covering up the total wordlessness of not knowing. But a poem is like a snapshot, a firefly you catch in your hands but can’t fully analyze or admire because you know that if you loosen your fingers just a little too much, it’ll fly away and not make sense anymore. They’re tiny, piecemeal stabs at understanding and remembering. If I can only capture why this moment is important, what about it made the lighting dim and the camera close in, remember the motion of her lips when she spoke, the pit in my stomach, the sound of the wind, then I’ll know I’ll have lived. I’ll have proof–on paper. A history. Something tangible.

This piece spawned from a moment like that. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering or huge–just something I noticed, a shirt, and what I thought it meant

Poems, I think, are attempts at achieving those other, rarer kinds of moments, the seconds that pass where all of a sudden you’re a million years old and sitting in a rocking chair, wise and completely at peace, content in knowing that you finally get it, you’re not confused anymore–or better, you’re just old enough to understand that there is no “getting it,” there’s only trying. And that’s okay.

This one’s from March 5, 2009. It’s called “An Old Shirt.”

An Old Shirt

“Today’s a sad day,” a friend said to me softly,
standing inside my doorframe like a picture
set in broken glass.

“My old band teacher,
Mr. Cassels,
he died this morning.

Heart-attack.”

He brushed lint from his tee-shirt,
an old white rag
with a music scale on it
and tiny black notes dangling on its lines,
hooked onto them like they were trying
not to fall.

“He was a good man,” he told me. “He had
a great laugh.
I used to love making him crack up.”

He brushed his shirt again
as if he were polishing the metal
of a statue. His hand
passed over it
like an apologetic wave goodbye—

as if he knew that that shirt,
that visible moment of silence,
that tiny personal tribute
was the best he could ever do,

and for that he was truly sorry.

]]> http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2010/01/02/you-cant-take-a-picture-of-this-an-old-shirt/feed/ 0 http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2009/12/27/havin-a-laugh-at-poochie-park/ http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2009/12/27/havin-a-laugh-at-poochie-park/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:10:01 +0000 Mike http://mellotronsounds.com/?p=1227 “I didn’t realize you wrote poetry
I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry”
-The Smiths

A couple posts ago I was talking about all that you could get away with in poetry. Well, this piece, I look at it today and it still makes me laugh, that I not only dedicated an evening to putting it together but that I actually had the balls to bring it in front of a class and read it aloud. People are writing diddies about their grandmothers and their tatoos, ex-boyfriends and alcohol, depression and sex. And I’m busy in my room crafting an ode to HBO’s The Wire, only with dogs instead of people. Oh, how I crack myself up.

I was just looking for a reason. When you’re in the middle of one of the best tv series ever made and in a poetry workshop in your last year of college and you overhear dogs going crazy in the distance at a dog park, it’s only natural that you imagine them warring over territory, that some dog drug deal has gone bad and there’s a badass vigilante pooch somewhere in the bunch out to disrupt the trade. Only natural.

I had a lot of fun with this one. It’s from March 15, 2009. It’s called “The Altercation at Poochie Park.”

The Altercation at Poochie Park

A white one with a bushy tail flashes her teeth
like they were switchblades or pistols
to prove she’s not a chump. She barks,
as if to say, “Play or get played,” then growls
like she owns the corner she’s crouching in.

Across the way, mongrels peddle Milk-bone
and Beggin Strips. They’re panting, giggling
as they hustle their stash. “Shit’ll sell,”
they’re repeating to each other. “Dumb mutts
don’t know it’s not bacon.”

Pure breeds line up like a gang against whitey,
their matted fur black and their eyes washed out
in hate. They bark back like gunshots, these canine gangsters
in a row, these racist Labs and Shepherds and Pomeranians.
The puppies in back are the wildest, shaking and yelping
at the cowards up front, saying, “We gotta stand tall!
She ‘aint nothing but an east-side bitch!”

Then the bitch tires of talking and attacks,
lunging from her corner toward the leader, a Lab
with a scar down the length of its face. They’re entwined,
loud and fast and tangled together—until hands come
and push them apart, pulling at their platinum collars
and hitting their noses. The gang disperses, yelling, “5-0! 5-0!”

And as the bitch is getting pulled away, she looks up
at the man dragging her toward a car. Her tail is between her legs
but she stares at him defiantly, as if to scoff,
as if to say, “I can jail.”
 

Sometimes I think they’re all I ever do (you know, minus the meter). I look at each piece I write and, whatever the topic, in one way or another it always seems like some form of hat tip to something that’s gone. The flowers I rest by who or whatever’s headstone usually accompanied by a huge loogie I hock on their grave.

What can I say, I love the hybrid. I’m fascinated by it, the past, what it means, what we’re supposed to do with its leavings. And when anger’s involved, I don’t know, the mix of fragile beauty and biting ugliness seems so real to me. Idolatry and blasphemy. “I miss everything about you–except your stupid face.”

I even like the word. “Elegy.” Such a nice sound for such a sad sentiment.

Anyway. This one’s from February 12th, 2009. It’s called “The Year You Dyed and Were Reborn”

The Year You Dyed and Were Reborn

When I first saw you again I almost laughed.
Your hair, straight and black, was draped
like an iron curtain over your scalp. Here
was you; here

was the rest of the world.
Your eyes were the same; they still smiled in crescents
when I looked at you. One green, the other blue—
just like when you left.

And you still couldn’t hold back the desire to cry
just from seeing me again, remembering me again.
You never did say that you stopped loving me back then.
You only sobbed, as if you knew that doubt were enough
and you had to drive away to make yourself safe from me.
So you sipped your coffee
and shielded your building tears with squinting eyelids.
You were different now,

you told me. And I smirked and nodded,
remembering your hair when it was soft and brown,
not black,
not coarse from color and chemicals.

I imagined your transformation,
the way you must have emerged
from your porcelain white cocoon and spread
your loud and boisterous wings
as if they were more than wings.

I imagined the moment before it must have happened,
your old face in the mirror, your old hands
touching your hair the way I used to, trying hard
to imitate the pressure in my fingers.
You must have stared at yourself for a long time.
You were getting grey in strands and patches
and you knew you were too young for that.

I envisioned watery streaks shining down your cheeks
from the pale fluorescent light above the mirror;
your stomach turned and your unsteady hands held your head
under a faucet,
baptizing you, cleansing you
of the memories
that clung to your locks like tangles.
They hurt too much to pull at or touch.
You cut them. You painted them black.
And their absence
poked and prodded at my wanting chest
like a dream I couldn’t remember.

There you sat, under the brilliant water-colored sky,
looking strong, confident, and still so beautiful—
your eyes mocking the clouds
as if the black painted over your scalp
could keep God
from seeing inside your head,
or the sun
from shining on your face.

You said
that you were different now.
And the dusky sky, glowing as though by candlelight,
looked down at us
just before it faded, and the breeze
that moved through both of our hair
was warm and heavy—an exhausted sigh,
blowing out the sun
and saying its sad goodnight.

*Free Verse: poetic verse that follows no fixed rhythmic or metrical pattern

One of the few artforms that’s managed, maybe only through self-promotion of the so-called intellectual “elite,” to uphold a genuine sense of untouchability is poetry. There have been bad boys, sure–Robert Frost, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams…–who’ve messed with the form and made it their own, in a lot of cases demystifying and humanizing it. But still, even today poetry remains the only medium I can think of that people are hesitant to unapologetically trash. People don’t like a movie, it’s because it’s horrible. A band, because it’s talentless. But a poem? Well…maybe it’s just not for them.

You ask me, the reason for all this is the bunk misconception that poetry is this highly refined, almost celestial form, measured in syllabics and strict rhyme and whatever else. And yeah, sometimes that can be true, but in all of it there’s this huge exception, this clause in the contract that says, “Ok, everything I just taught you–forget it. Now instead, do whatever the hell you want”: and that’s free verse. Free verse says you don’t have to rhyme or count syllables. You don’t have to have the same amount of lines in each stanza. You can write how you speak and write about anything, write dialogue if you want to, indent lines in the middle of stanzas, float words in the middle of the page. This is creativity, dammit! It expresses itself however it expresses itself. This is where the term “poetic license” was born.

But they didn’t focus too much on that in grade school.

Free verse was one of the things that made me an English major. Nothing has to have rules — this is a pretty powerful revelation. And once it happens to you, you start worrying more about actually writing and less about fitting into some structure of what you think writing is supposed to be. You start exploring deeper the things you care about and why you care about them, thinking about the things you think about, fleshing out your memories and sense of humor, all the passing thoughts that somehow seem like more than just thoughts when they shuffle by. Say what you want to say, how you want to say it. We’re all poets, each trying to find our voice in prose we tune to sound like music.

You can get away with pretty much anything free-forming (trust me), and after awhile, it’ll stop feeling like you’re “getting away” with stuff and more like you’re making it, pulling it out and articulating it from the bottom of wherever emotions come from. Which can be as scary as it can be awesome. And eye-opening. And even sometimes fun.

This one’s from January 27th of this year. It’s called “Mr Frederick.”

Mr Frederick

They said he’d make you stay
after class
to shine his bald head
if you were bad. It was grade
school, back when we’d run
from girls and play

the recorder under bright fluorescents.
Ta ta tee-tee ta, he’d sing, guiding
our noise with his. And he taught us
how to spell “Connecticut.”
“Connect I cut,” he told us, and made
it easy.

He didn’t have a first name, a wife,
a family, or a favorite
Beatles album. But every time
I spell Connecticut, I break
it up, sound it out, and smirk,
remembering those days when I blew wildly

into that stupid recorder.

A) I’m working full-time now

2) I was focusing on buying a new computer and transferring my URL to Wordpress for a while

D) I just discovered Half-Life 2.

Having said that…more than a few times I’ve considered posting some of the poetry I’ve written in some of my college workshops on here. And I think for the sake of staying semi-active, and for making this blog a bit more comprehensive, I’m finally gonna do it. I thought about looking through my archives and picking out some “early-period” stuff as well, but it was just too much. To simplify, I’ll stick with just workshop material, and every few days I’ll post a poem that I presented in class, starting with one from my first poetry-exclusive workshop.

It’s funny, re-reading a lot of the older work in these folders. A lot of what I imagined at the time to be these profound metaphors now seem pretty lame, or sometimes plain nonsensical. But I think it’s interesting to try to reconnect with older “versions” of your self that you don’t necessarily relate to anymore. To even kind of embrace the whininess or pretentiousness–because if nothing else, it was real at the time.

This piece I still kinda like, though. The exercise was to write a poem from a random newspaper headline. After you have that base, it’s cool to see how your obsessions kind of leak back in to make this hybrid of author-specific themes and an out-there “plotline.”

This one’s from November 15th, 2008. It’s called “Sky Birth.”

Sky Birth

Against the pinks and dark blues of sunset
I plummet, cradling
my doomed and pregnant stomach—
bloated and curved like the top of the world.
My body breaks
through clouds and I imagine
the streaks I leave in the sky
as abstract footprints, proof
that I have lived.

Tiny, uncalloused hands, whose prints extend only
to the thin walls around my heart, now pound
against my flesh, reaching up
to find my ribs and force itself
away from me.

Below my skin, muffled whimpers
mean my baby thinks
it can be happy there, on the earth
getting clearer and more colorful
the closer we come to smashing into it.

It all made so much sense: marriage, pregnancy,
saying, “I love you;”
but now I’m falling, numb, a baby
inside of me aching to see
the sun and sky for the very first time—unaware
that soon we’ll hit the ground,
hard, like birds born without wings.

Tears roll upward at this speed
like wrong-sided rain, my long hair hangs
above me.  Everything
is backward now.

At this distance pull the chord,
they said; it is your lifeline.
Pull it, and you’ll be safe,
they told me.  Pull it
and everything will be okay.

From birthbed to deathbed wide eyes grow
tired and unfinished, losing focus,
seeing nothing
but the cloudy film
of their own decay.  But in me
heartbeats thunder, the weather
never changes.
Better to just close my eyes,
meet the ground, fall
into it, through it, become a part of it.

Air is getting warmer now, earth wider—its vast arms
spread apart to take me in.  I feel the sun
breathe hot on my face, the wind run fingers
through my hair.  Grass is just below me, soil,

newly blossomed pinks and blues.
The baby cries, kicks; I close
my eyes and wait for the butterflies
to die, for our lies to transcend
into silence.

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