Dear Prudence, Why Don't You Come Out And Play And Get Out Of My Writing Journal

I have the innate devotion to the marriage between words, and yet the darker side of me believes wholeheartedly in torrid love affairs. Why should we deprive our beloved words of passionate happiness?

Poem from Journal (orig.date 03/11/09)

I'm a napkin note kind of person. Pieces of these poems materialize all over, and come together and grow in ways even I don't fully understand. Taking a moment from the blood . . . this poem is still about breakfast.
Oh, and this one has a title already

Q & A: A New Yorker Kind of Breakfast

It was Fraser Field the last time
my legs got stuck on the bleachers
as my father and I watched the Mad Dogs
play like any other baseball team, major, minor
or little league, the game of baseball is the game of baseball
to me he seems so forced as he
sits there in his flannel over Venture Brother tee
his bear hat left on as he eats
his blueberry bagel with butter
baiting me with a pop quiz about hometown bliss
(or piss is more like it)
my banana-nut muffin starts out sweet, but hardens and cakes in my mouth
getting tangled in all the words I want to speak, but don't
the words he forces me to swallow
cutting
me off at the start of the race then
clinging
to each word as they scrape their way down my esophagus
churning
in the acid of my stomach
burning their way out
permeating
into the rest of me
where they explode, taking out other various parts of me
I catch him hacking away all the time
trying to get at those words I tried to get out
all on my own
break
I saw the stain on the back of his jeans as he ordered at the counter of the cafe
I focus on the image of it as we slip in and out of awkward silence, "The New Yorker has the worse comics," he says
I don't take the bait, instead I am remembering that stain,
those imperfections, those unintentional mishaps, those marks on his soul
that only I know, that even he doesn't know that I know
make me in some way invincible to the reality of this moment, guard me against his axe
make me love him that much more
but
he's far, far, far
from loving my mark.*

*I must say these poems lose something not in their forms. I love figured poems. Yum.

The method . . . I suppose

I love poetry that changes. Being able to catch some of the author's edits generally gives you an insight to their method. Every poet is different, I mean I've been told to read books on "writing" (most of those books are merely about how to give credit where credit's due) but that seems about as useful as reading a book on "how to be yourself." Untapped gem some of you internet-goers may not know about, the JFK library . That's all I'm going to say. No more. Just google it. So here's what I propose, here's the raw, raw, raw start of a poem.




I stared longingly at the blueberry pancake in front of me
Those berries bursting in my mouth seemed like something I had
Dreamed, vividly, yet never experienced
I looked up over the breakfast table, at my father grinding his dentures
Reading the Daily Item
The clanking, gum smacking noise
Was as rhythmic as a lullaby, a lullaby sung to me for my whole 20
Years on this earth
The result of a disease, that rotted his mouth, made him bleed
The taste of blood has always been a mystery to me, people have described it as
Rust, yet, I’ve never tasted rust
But blood, well my blood, I know what that
tastes like
Mornings spent doubled-over
in excruciating pain
Hoping for any kind of end
Like a pepto bismol chaser after every shot of hard reality
I’m terrified that this blood taste still lingers somewhere in the recess of my jowl
And it will infect my favorite foods
It will tarnish the breakfast with Dad
And instead of the melting-buttery taste each morsel of pancake fluff embodied
I’ll bite into the corner of 54th and 3rd. Waiting by the falafel cart for the
Walking man, eying the entrance to Barnes and Nobles
Refuge from the moments
It could be a 16 minute walk if one practically ran from 71st to 54th and I made it in 12
12 times I relived the moment in that office with the view of a fire
Escape
And a brick wall
The sound of the door closing behind me was really
Someone sucking the air out of the room, we were alone with his collections
as he went in for the touch
Telling me he knew why someone like me was in his office
I can tell someone like you has lots of thoughts floating around in her head, it wasn’t the thoughts he wanted then
As he brushed a piece of hair covering the horror in her face
His finger smelling of pathetic moments of rejections from women half his size
I puff out my chest and close my eyes and crawl out of the window with the fire escape
To a place where I’m simply fishing with my dad
Fuck vampires and werewolves there are worse clichés who haunt
The hallowed halls of institution
These monsters, refined by the time and the technology
Simulacra of the men they claim to be
Prey
In the loop holes and bank
On the embarrassment
And the blood runs
Starts as an unsuspecting cough boiling inside the lungs, but it isn’t from my lungs though I’m drowning in the Red Sea
Its lower, but the pain burns everywhere, I vomit
And then the splat
Such an extraordinary shape as its prominent red dots couldn’t be more than a quarter of an inch
As the tech-savvy 20 year old screams I have TB the crowd
parts
And I focus on the top dot it’s growing bigger.
No I’m getting smaller?
No I’m getting closer to it
I’m sliding under the moment
I pull myself together and cover the slither of blood in the corner of
my mouth
Tastes like slaughter. I miss her already.
I’ll write about that moment and relive it a hundred times
In a hundred different ways, places and with a hundred different characters
The combination seem endless
But her name, the one I kill for closure, the one whose blood I taste
The one I see in the face of every woman
Her name is Nadie.
She is nobody
She is everybody
She is me
That moment was her moment
To die, Bach contributed the soundtrack
A minor detail
I remember looking back at her through the window, yes I left her
I had to, I had to split, it was survival of the fittest that was the narration playing over the scene when I made my great escape
Self preservation, utilitarian
Dark clouds
Smell like spring rain . . .
Taste like shit.
But I stepped into the room.
That is my individual cross to bear.*

*As the author, I don't owe you an explanation. So don't ask.

I'll edit it some more over the next few weeks like I do all my poems. Check back if you'd like. Comment/criticize . . . it's a free country (thank God).