Thursday, August 4, 2016

Message From Inside The Box

You'd think I could write a poem,
since that's what I do, or, should
I say, that's what happens.

Where do they come from?
Haven't been many lately.
Sometimes they come in bunches,
like grapes...what a delight to see
ripe fruit on the vine!

Maybe they come from another 
dimension...maybe they're stored
for lifetimes 'til the right trigger 
is pulled.

I always wrote, I never knew why,
and I was always surprised to see,
like when you're amazed at the
sight in the toilet; to think that that
had just been inside you, that ones
darkest workings are hidden from
sight, function secretly, automatically,
as if part of some cosmic plan.

I've got a question. Did we shop for
these bodies, these particular lives?
Did some look for the new Escalade,
while others wanted an old jalopy they
could refurbish and soup up? Smooth
sailing or a project? Hard to know.

So, yes, I can write, writing happens,
but I wouldn't particularly call this a
poem...this is just words, my friends,
just words I would say to anyone...part
of a conversation I'll never have.

I'm spoiled by words...I make them up,
or combine them in new ways, like
fusion cooking.

People like reading novels, stories...I
can't write them, whether because of 
A.D.D., or, just because my dogma is if
you can't express yourself in a page,
you really have nothing to say.

I wrote for over forty years before I 
thought of myself as a "writer", even,
albeit, (love that word) a mediocre one.
I'm a poet by default because I can't do
the other things I used to any more. Like
all writers, I guess, I enjoy that some 
people like to read me.

Watching Herbert Huncke and Gregory
Corso reminisce about their beat lives, 
lives before they became known and 
admired as significant, their cheerful 
faces and twinkling knowing nods, they
seem to enjoy adoration of young people
that realize they wrote important truths.
They sang at the right time, when America
was fruitful, not fruitless, when the intellect 
still had elbow room to navigate, when joy
seemed like a possible outcome of a new
wave breaking on the shore.

Will I be remembered? Will they is more
pertinent. Will the geniuses of literature
survive the pollution of Orwellian fabricated
minds, survive past an era of moments of
seeming surety?

Even if humanity goes the way of the Dodo,
as long as intelligence is born somewhere,
whether on this world or another, the truth,
the gleaming diamond of inevitable conclusion,
is certain to arise.







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