Everything is wrong.
The world is going to end
before I write a poem worthy of
the end of the world, and
that’s worse than when I had
cancer and found out about it
when I peed blood into my toilet
on the night Michelle Obama
gave her speech at the
Democratic National Convention.
Worse than when
the...
(REDACTED... for now)
...be happy forever, and
worse than when my first-born son
was given a death sentence,
less than an hour after drawing breath.
A poet’s inner monologue is trauma porn,
looking for an audience to suffer it with.
This isn’t the best poem
I ever wrote. It’s basically shit.
It’s true, but shit nonetheless.
And you need to know that
when I started writing this,
I had every intention for
better than some
fourth-runner-up-in-a-poetry-slam
screamer.
I apologize for that.
And if I ever read this
in a coffee house, or
lower-case-god forbid, on stage,
in the spotlight, I promise
to turn in my page poet card
on the way out the door.
At least I was right when
I said,
everything is wrong.
Today’s Break in the Month of November Has Been Brought to You by…
Now that I have you’re attention, and poured my next cup of it’s barely still morning coffee, while at the same time re-re-re-re-rerere-watching that Kaiju Classic, War of the Gargantuas on PlutoTV, I’ve concluded that this is a no poetry today kinda day.
Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote, “I do not know whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it”.
Damn.
See, a couple of times already this month, I’ve experienced what I will call… because it sounds way cooler… “Existential Gaps” in my bloggy output. The first lasting three days, the other, four. Each of these gaps was closed by a kind of controlled manic episode, akin to something lots of people fall into when they fully grasp that guests are on their way, and nobody has cleaned the kitchen stove, or the bathroom toilet, in weeks. So they end up two-fisting all the cleaning supplies and turn everything soiled into spotless, just in time for their guests to walk, smiling, through the front door, and into the cloud of Comet, Windex, and Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, hanging in the air that surrounds them.
My reason for these November gaps, and the mania that closed them, was a combination of a simple, week-long common cold, and the intermittent affliction Camus wrote about, that comes in the form of…
(Okay, War of the Gargantuas is over. Now it’s time to make soup and watch the end of another treatise on fictional existential realities, Good Will Hunting)
…I don’t know, a glitch in momentum? Like, not wanting to make a big deal out of a sore throat and clogged sinuses when thirty-something percent of my immediate friends suffer from debilitating chronic illnesses? Or yeah, maybe it’s that I still haven’t fully come to grips with whether or not Camus was right, or if giving a shit that you complete 30 days of blogging at this time in human history even matters, when most of us are hoping that what we do today matter when we’re gone.
So will it? Will it matter?
If by transcendent, you mean will what I do here echo in some non-corporeal ether, because something I did in this life had a component of righteous efficacy? Well, that’s a HELL NO. Did I used to believe that? Yes. In fact, I used to TEACH that, although you’re only ever gonna get the full story out of me with offers of cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy. But if by transcendent, you mean will what I do here, or say here, echo in the hearts and minds of those to whom I did the doing or the saying? If THAT’S what you mean, that’s a HELL YES.
And just so you know, I love Albert Camus almost as much as I love cheesecake, bourbon, puppies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kaiju movies, and nailing the answer to the Final Jeopardy! clue, every night, Monday through Friday at 7:23 pm, by the grace of some nebulous god, my great big brain, and the lickable corner store temporary stamp tattoos, chock full of so much timed-release LSD my tiny ten-year-old self ingested that, to this day, I can still remember things I’m not even sure I ever learned, as long as you give me thirty seconds, and hum the Final Jeopardy! jingle.
And yet, I still haven’t memorized a single one of my old poems.
Anyway, for a day that started out pretty bleak, what with the existential dread and all, I feel better now, so there’s that. And maybe going forward, I’ll think a little differently about transcendence. Also, if you’ve got cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy, have I got a story for you.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Lie to You
Today,
I would lie to you,
just to make you feel better.
Tomorrow,
I would tell you the truth,
for the same damn reason.
Both of these are probably love.
Some day,
I hope you’ll do
the same for me.
Seasons
They say California
has no seasons.
We know that’s
bullshit, of course.
It’s only that
our seasons show
in the Sunrise,
the Sunset, Neon,
and the Full Moon.
Proletariat Kinks
If we could burn the world down
together, would that make us a match
made in hell?
And will you only want me when
things get hot, or is it that you
can’t stand seeing the world on fire,
all alone?
I know the likelihood of these being
answers on a dating profile are about
as slim-to-none as us actually
burning anything down,
together or apart, but I think,
as questions go, they’re more important
than what we want to eat on
our first date.
Questions which, should we ask them,
might make our first date,
our last.
I’m not unstable, I swear. No more
than any other high-functioning anarchist,
living in a world where life is measured
paycheck-to-paycheck,
and death, in how soon we finish
grieving, and get back to measuring
paychecks. Maybe if Soylent Green
was billionaires.
But until that dream is real, maybe
we could start by striking that match,
lighting some candles, and talking about
our proletariat kinks.
Mine involve a double scoop of
chocolate ice cream, served at a parade,
on the first day of May.
Proud
I would gladly send you
a book of my poetry, just
as soon as I become proud
of any of them.
Time Travel Isn’t Real
A long story, a lot shorter.
There’s a line that goes,
you can love someone and know
you’re not supposed to be with them.
And there’s another line that goes,
you can know you’re not supposed to be
with them, and still love someone.
I think that’s worse.
Read it again. I’ll wait.
The way the word, MELANCHOLY,
is worse than I thought it was
before I Googled it. Shit.
Worse. Apt, but worse.
The way I’ve become a cliché is worse.
Maybe I should Google the word CLICHÉ,
but that might be a bad idea, because
MELANCHOLY.
Yep, it was worse.
Don’t read that again. Just don’t.
There’s a line that goes,
you can do ninety-nine things right,
and one thing wrong.
I fell in love. That wasn’t
the one thing. I’ll never know
what the one thing was.
Now I think that’s worse. Fuck.
ShitFuckFuckShitFuck. Just fuck.
And I wish time travel was real.
Time travel isn’t real. Fuck.
“Hello…
…What’s going on? How are you?”
I know, asking that doesn’t help. Personally, after November, I’m thinking of writing a book of pre-, mid-, and post-dyspocalypstopian* short stories that try to make sense of all… okay, any… of this life. And not just this last week, or the last three months before that, or even the last thirty years before that.
Stories take a long time to tell. Stories take even longer to tell themselves.
So I’ve made my mind up that these are the stories I’m going to tell. Something I failed to mention in the first post of this month was that I believe, and have believed for some time, that my poetry career is coming to a close, and that thing I have always wanted to write… scary stories… is about to find its way onto my horizon. I’ve been influenced by scary stories my whole life. Kaiju. Zombies. The childhood fears of Stephen King. The whole catalogue of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. Depending on what decade, these were my bedtime stories. I mean, even now, I still doze off at night to reruns of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. All of these are straight up cautionary tales of what happens when humanity forgets what it means to remain human in the midst of a fucked up world.
And as far as I can see, like with those times long ago, there is no better time than now for me to resurrect this genre for fun and profit. You know, like Gage Creed’s dad did for him in Pet Sematary. Just a little object lesson that hopefully works out better for me than it did for all of them.
So while I’ve got you, tell me.
What kind of stories to you want to hear out of me, when the poetry has all dried up, and there’s only one kind of tale left to tell? Let me know in the comments. I can’t wait to read what YOU have to say.
Talk to you tomorrow.
dyspocalypstopian*, a portmanteau that stands for dystopian apocalyptic literature. a neologism. one that I just made up
Tomahawk Chop
Every October, when a Georgia racist’s
thoughts turn themselves towards the
Major League Baseball Playoffs in Atlanta,
and that sell-out crowd 41,500 fans drive their
team to rally, with a rousing Tomahawk Chop,
and a boisterous sing-a-long of Pow Wow the Indian Boy*,
what I root for is everyone in the stands to swiftly
and mysteriously come down with 41,500 cases of terminal
small pox, embedded in all the free rally towels,
donated courtesy of the recompense of God.
*a song composed in 1949 by Monty Kelly, and popularized on the
CBS children’s morning television program Captain Kangaroo
Black Coffee and Brownies at a Writer’s Retreat
Sometimes it takes a day,
sometimes longer,
sometimes it never happens at all,
if I’m not in the mood
to write as though
a muse just brought me
black coffee, and a brownie.
I like black coffee. I like brownies.
And I like a muse who
brings them to me, as if all they ever
wanted from me were my words.
William S. Friday 