Alphabet circus
Who’s this jerk? Is she
Really originality or
Reality at stake
O’clock o’ the morning
Won’t you give me some warning
Ahead of time
It’s coming
It’s coming
The flood better climb
Tag: death
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I won’t write something pointless
No the fuck I won’t
I’ll write something commorient about commitment
And then I’ll die alone
I won’t write something bloodless
I promise myself I won’t
I’ll write about a period, if I have to
To get that point across
I won’t write something sinister
With its moral greys and blues
I won’t write something poignant
About what I’ve heard from headline news
I won’t write anything that rhymes
For much longer than a few lines
And I won’t take classes
To teach me how to write
I won’t copy all my heroes
I won’t plagiarize their faults
I won’t beguile you with my clever diction
Playful syntax, charming tone
Quick turn of wit or unborn phrasing
I simply tell you: I won’t.
Instead I’ll lay in bed and rot
And go to work more days than not
I’ll waste my money
And all my time
I’ll be alone a lot.
I’ll notice the contractions in my poems
But I won’t do much about ‘em.
I’ll punctuate myself with fallacies,
Cliches, and French words I don’t know.
I won’t decide well where to put many periods
And I won’t watch the way the blood leaves
I’ll just barely notice it as it’s going
I’ll be just one more word
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Oh baby how can I ever get you back,
Unmet prayer, insidious invocation
Aside, there’s a charm to getcha back
Spells, I’m speaking as a witch
And you stopped listening.
Good. You don’t need to see my crystal skull, my rotten bones, my grey hairs or
My caving teeth, you spoiled boy you meet
Carbohydrates with a worldfull of smokeflavor, screaming beef
Brazen cattle, we tramp stamp boy fans
We have hunger, for other tastes more sweet
If I’m allowed
I’ll repeat
You were not a bad boy
You are now a bad man
You have the prerogative to change
Shirk and I have
The responsibility
To kill you
So what do you think about that
Fat man
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I really have nothing to say, I’m just sleepy and feeling unuseful. This won’t be my best work. I’m just typing.
I got a rejection letter today, I started that another day. I can’t really tell what rhymes and it seems I’m high all the time. I’m just typing.
I listen to a lot of YouTube healers, carry it around my neck, I do, I listen on my lunch break. I can’t stop me express myself, but I got a letter in the mail.
Well actually I got an email.
Something about me isn’t quite right for them. They haven’t seen me, I have a tattoo of a pen. I don’t look quite right to anybody, about my beauty is on the fence and who wants to read me my voice is weird and my background is a history, there’s no fact here, hence nothing they’d like to try to pronounce dead-upon-scene, I haven’t the slack for academia, I’m writing at my own creed.
I’m just typing. I’m just typing. I’m just trying out a voice, I can’t spend my life writing seven of the same sentences over clouds over clouds over clouds again. The time is now, bitches, get up out of bed and be witches, bitches, it’s all gone to our heads, can’t you hear the horn now? A-woooooga, that’s a brass section, mama, wake up your daughter’s on reefer again.
I’m just typing. For the love of my life I could do better. I’m just typing. For the love of starvation I could eat nothing. I’m just typing. I could start a revolution right here in my bed. If only I could get all the bedsheets out of my head. What will they think that means?
You’ll go crazy. Don’t think about it. Get up and go somewhere else. You freak. Get up the nerve, sicko, get up the nerve. You haven’t seen me going over the Manitoba falls, sir, no sir you don’t.
Won’t is such a…word…you know?
God you have to be as strange as you can be to yourself between the gaps of your thoughts so you can take a pair of pliers to your wires and know it’s you who lightsed-out and not some copy of yourself on a seldom-heard-of freak of nature’s metacognition platform on x’s dime, no no no. I have too much to say.
You have no idea what you started until you’re dead. I’m just typing. How to convey how mad I am? I am irate, furious, shrieking even, but you’d rather I tear a hole in my body than open the unobstructed in your own and just listen for one fucking second.
I’m just typing.
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Wave your hands in front of it, first. If that doesn’t get you an answer, try to pick up a corner and peek underneath. Not all of them can be dealt with this way, many will just likely slide through your two little fingers, you’ll remember, you are alone. You’re never with a ghost. The absence isn’t there any more than anything is there, it’s just nothing with a shape. You might try walking through it. 5 to 7 chance the shiver will tell you something. Hold your hand in the cold, that’s an idea, the whispers might travel clear enough through your bones to hit your ear drums, you might hear something. Ignoring it with your back is another strategy, but your back is more sensitive, gives away more, than you think it does, and then the ghost starts learning about you, better ways to conspicuously avoid you into your most vacuous state. Then you’d be a ghost, too, and then you might understand it better. Though at that point it doesn’t matter. You’re not matter anymore. Matter grips anti-matter, never goes well, always leaves a scar.
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Writers sometimes think up sentences that say beautifully what is intended, and they rush to their device to capture it in the light; they are crushed if they miss the portal.
That’s sort of what it is, inspiration.
Precision coming from practiced skill does not always make the best sentence, like this one. I know it was wrong, I did it any way to make a poent. This is poeitry.
Think of anything as poetry, think of everything as one.
I surprise myself with directions my fingers take, the shapes they make are sad cowgirl blues, worship of autumn, clouds taking shapes behind you, ladyfingers jobs, those delicate touch shapes that move only just enough to be a little bit happier.
But I’m still mad I lost that sentence.
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I’m on a mission.
I want to read a shitload of books before I die.
I’m going to leave the quantitative interpretation of ‘shitload’ up to future me. If they’re really lucky, maybe the walls of their house will be constructed from the stacks of books they’ve acquired over their (I hope, very long and exquisitely fruitful) journey on this pale blue dot.
At this moment, 26-year-old me is new to being late-twenties and feeling a little woozy about it. I’m reading ‘Galapagos’ by Kurt Vonnegut on the recommendation of a now-former roommate.
I’m also back to basement-dwelling. This time, at least, I don’t have an egomaniacal 200-pound tumor following me around and chasing me out of any other meaningful human interactions. The ghost of my first cat lives here with me. The remorse and the grief perfume the walls. She rests inky on my shoulder.
I’m feeling a little woozy about being a 26-year-old basement-dwelling, tumor-less, cat ghost whisperer. I’m reading ‘Galapagos’ to invest in future me’s deathbed book shitload. Vonnegut is a masterful storyteller. We know this. I aspire.
In the third chapter, Vonnegut describes English scientist Charles Darwin as having been “a mere stripling of twenty-six” when he sailed aboard the Beagle in the 1830s.
And this stripling is living in a basement, behind a wall of three lifetime’s worth of junk, writing a blog post for a website they’ve forgotten to update with the latest book of poems they’ve published. Is anyone listening? I doubt it. And maybe that’s alright.
Darwin didn’t publish his ‘Origin of Species’ until 1859, several decades and an entire family life after he embarked on his grand adventure.
No matter how old you feel, you’re younger than you think.
My fruitful life, my shitload of books, will build slowly.
If I keep up the pace, maybe my north-facing wall will be constructed of the pages I’ve written. Maybe I’ll read each one to myself over the last year of my life. Maybe I’ll pull the rug out when I’m done, just so I can feel the full weight of a shitload of books on my old body.
Lorraine The Wrighter 