April 30, 2011. So long, April, and a few thoughts.

"Depression is my kitchen, and I can whip up a mean ennui."

 

Was just talking to a friend and that came out. Sometimes I forget and have to be reminded. My mind takes me places I don't want to go. Like a drinking buddy who turns slightly sadistic and reckless after a few beers. If you ever wonder why I don't blog more about the day-to-day nuts and bolts of my life, there are several reasons: 1. They're not that interesting. 2. I write as a way to process these events, and to do so I cannot simply chronicle them. I have to step back, sometimes far back, until I seem to be talking about another subject entirely. 3. You don't want to read about how we're always struggling.

So, if you're not already my Facebook friend, here are a few pieces you may not yet have seen.

 

SOME PARADISE

I was separated and had this one-room place

I thought would knuckle me down. Full-time job

in the daytime, drunk every night. I had no TV,

one window and just an old electric typewriter.

Like the others in that building, I degenerated:

scribbled cartoons on my walls, read Hamsun's

"Hunger" and believed the radio was talking

only to me. Oh but the poems! They landed

on my arms like parrots in a Miami theme park.

You should have seen all the colors.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

The house is quiet
as an old woman sewing

Solemn as a Hungarian
folk tale
where a girl grieves
her love
until she is nothing but
cloth and tears

And must
like a doll
be darned whole.

Comments

[trainwatcher]

Your poems speak to/for those of us who flail through life in jagged, elliptical orbits, never quite sure where the next cycle will take us, and even less sure that we want to go there. They ARE about "the day-to-day nuts and bolts" of your life, except that life isn't a nice, neat Erector set with a complete set of parts and illustrated step-by-step instructions. It just comes at us, like a three-year-old who bounces up and hands us a crayon drawing of purple blobs and red squiggles, then gets annoyed when we can't figure out that "It's a cow, silly." You have a gift for helping us step back far enough to see the cow. Thanks for that.

[Darcy]

Love :)

[Charlie]

Bob - That's a great way of putting it. You sure YOU aren't a poet?

Darx - Thanks.