Eventually, you’ll want
to start writing it down,
thinking the story will
spoil otherwise. And then
going downstairs some night,
you’ll think you found a body
underneath some lumber or,
in a grim-comic vein,
thirty years of pulp magazines.
Just a ventriloquist’s dummy,
leering like you expected it to.
Go deeper.
Belated tribute to David Clewell
Another sign of my brain waking up again after a long hibernation: I started thinking about a poem that was very influential to me in the late 1990’s – early 2000’s: We Never Close by David Clewell (To read the entire poem for free, create a JSTOR account).
My own internal reading of it has always been a lot more deadpan; listening to this reading by Clewell himself helped me pick up some rhythms to this poem that I’d never quite picked up on.
Real Life Update
A few lines from a pleasantly frittered evening yesterday.
I got a new job recently which features the lowest amount of busy-work and license plate making since the early 2000s. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’ve ever had it so good. If I can get organized I’ve got some angsty poems to write about how the past decade nearly broke me, but for now I will look on the bright side and say I’ve got it pretty good.
Another thing which has brought peace and joy to my heart: I deleted practically all social media from my phone and tablet. This has forced me, with only minor relapses, to read books, and there is something about the process of reading paragraphs and sentences and not reading the angry musings of stupid narcissists that starts tuning your brain up for writing better.
Continue reading “Real Life Update”After dropping out of school in the 1920s
After dropping out of school in the 1920s, Cecil Smith, 94, of Westlake Village becomes the oldest known recipient of the GED. [An essay question was] what have you learned since leaving school?
– from a 2002 article by Steve Chawkins, LA Times
You learn to answer questions with more questions,
because you honestly don’t know.
You go to school while young,
but all you learn then
is how answers will fit on a page.
The Dream of Robert Kane Scholars
My kitchen is filled with men in black suits
I ask one of them to tell me the story of Batman,
as I know the outline, the bare facts found in comic books,
but not the deeper mythology.
Their spokesman listens patiently, says:
“We can only tell the true story of Bruce Wayne in plainsong.”
Where I Live
I am disoriented,
waking up on the literal wrong side
spending half my life in a city
I am in transition to.
Stocking two shelves
Between two stools
Two of everything,
Which has been a theme in my life,
owning spares, looking for certain promises,
a better city, but winding up trying to decide
which place gets the best of me,
which one gets the back numbers,
the ragged couch.
Close Call with COVID
Around the end of last year, someone I know went somewhere with me and sort of overlooked the fact that he and his wife had respiratory symptoms. One day later he called me to say he had tested positive, his wife negative.
I spent the next 2 weeks as quarantined as possible. I work remotely, so that was pretty – quarantined. I did not go anywhere in public. There were a couple of occasions where I had to enter a building briefly, but I stayed well away from people. My wife had been to a doctor’s office (routine visit) the morning of the day we got the news, so I told her to call them. Their reaction was pretty blasé.
Continue reading “Close Call with COVID”Iambic
The beauty of the evening shade is what
we make of it; the sound of water flowing
down a stream that we cannot see, even
though we peer into a night that has
a moon; a full and round thing shining in
the distance over water towers that we
saw with younger eyes; we told each other
that the cold would never reach our love.
The Lights
The search for lights
takes me down suburban streets
both similar and literally the same
as my childhood; the strange thought
in the shadows surrounding the people
inside, the progression of lives
as they keep turning along the solstice.
Real Life Update (and last Twitter auto-update)
In which I make the usual excuses and focus on the collective, veering slightly to the personal
Very early in the Trump administration, I posted something that began with my favorite one-line poem-within-a-poem. Reynolds Price attributed it to Robert E. Lee, but I strongly suspect Price wrote it himself:
A country emptied by the fear of war.
from The Dream of Lee, Reynolds Price
poetrytech 