40/30

He blurts it out
or whispers it to himself:
“40/30,” and is secretly pleased.

What could that mean?
Forty over thirty reduces to
four over three,

which could be
an obvious statement
about what works

in a street brawl:
four thugs beat three thugs,
maybe not every time

but it’s the safe way to bet.
Maybe four over three
is the odds of something happening

that’s likely but not certain.
Could be a brag:  ”I over-achieved.”
Could be a formula, or a key to a code.

It might, of course, mean nothing at all
to anyone except the one for whom
it means a lot, or everything.  Maybe

we are not meant to know
what led him to speaking of that fraction,
that motto, that driver of action: 40/30,

scribbled on a last page
of a manuscript, on a concrete
or social media wall.  Numbers

can obscure as surely as they
clarify.  Maybe it means nothing at all,
even to him;

when you get down to it,
in fact, I’m sure
it means nothing at all. 

The Method

Blue-green three-hole punched
notebook; black notebook, 
pocket-sized; big, bound
sketchbook; all unruled,
solid, ready.

All mostly empty.
More fetishes than tools.
Own the paper, be the artist.
I’m an actor.
This is criminal. 

I should steal a pen,
something richy-rich,
plated; something 
that doesn’t write well, 
doesn’t float across the page;

some small part
of this should be difficult.
Require me to put in work;
clean myself up; act right;
pick up a notebook; plunge in.

Fifteen Hundred Poems

I’ve written fifteen hundred poems
in thirty nine months.  In that time

all the sun has done
is shine on me, lighting the world

in the process.  All the sky has done
is hover above me, umbrella

to the art.  All the sea has done
is wash and rage upon and generally applaud

my work.  It has been a fine ride
from the before to the now, I confess.

The ephemeral nature of it all
notwithstanding, I am that fucking special:

The Machine Poet!  
El Prolifico, 

though I was a poet before all this 
calculation.  Used to be

I always counted the pieces
but I never raced myself to more.

Fifteen hundred poems in these last
thirty-nine months, averaging a little over

one a day, and each was a vitamin 
I made you swallow — I made me swallow –

oh, does anyone feel better 
for all this?  Am I not still as weary of 

who I am as when I started – 
have I not yet lost enough of myself

in all those words
to stop counting?  To admit how lovely

the sun, sky and sea are
without roping them to my service?

To just sit down
and be?

 

It’s A Pathology, This Poet Thing

I so wanted an emergency
to inspire me this morning
but instead had to make do
with a full night’s sleep
and a good mood upon rising.

If I get hungry I can warm up
last night’s nutritious leftovers –
who cares if I have good pasta
for breakfast?  I could keep it to myself,
I suppose, although we all know

I won’t, seeing that I haven’t yet, ever; 
what did you expect?   I will write on food
for food, love, sustenance;
will write about how
sometimes anger fails me, and how

angry that makes me.  Hell, I can conjure
a crisis out of anything
and make it last long enough
to hang some art on it…puts me
one step away from a politician,

a journalist, a captain of industry.
Better, of course, to sit and be well
with the happiness. To see what comes
from tolerating contentment.  To not have
anything come of it.  Maybe

I won’t be an artist anymore,
or at least not for a bit.  I could learn
how to tolerate that without making it
a crisis and then writing about it, but
seriously, would I still exist?

 

Breaking The Block

Tell it
to vomit a little
See where that takes you

Tell it
you can hear music
it needs to describe

Write / discard
paint / discard
sculpt / discard
compose / discard
then smile
when it tells you
to knock that shit off 
and save a little something…then

discard some more

Get with a partner
and ding the paint a little
Got a cliff?  
Jump off
Tell the thing
to fly piss fuck
off

Rename yourself
then remain yourself
with a ream of paper and
blood crayons

Forget about it 
Knuckle drag a week around
Club your foot into submission
Blah Blah Blah a college course
Masticate masturbate 
Make up a word and 
Manchurate then
define it for us

Christ,
if you absolutely have to

Drop a little acid 
if after all that
you still can’t make it work –
I know a guy

Just
for the sake of crisis
stop writing 600 word epic posts
notes and updates
letters to old mentors
and essays
about how you can’t
write
anymore

Because the block
is a ghost
only as strong as 
your belief in it
The truth is
all you’ve got is a bad case
of hating your results

so do the art you are meant to do
toss what you hate

you will get there
and if not?

do the art anyway
for the love of process and 
self

 

Animals As Leaders

Once upon a time

a wolf, a hawk, a dog,
a cat, a snake, and a pig
were hanging out together
in the one place they could relax and not
be each other’s natural prey or enemy –
outside a poet’s house.  

Each was waiting
to be chosen to serve
as a symbolic inspiration to others 
or to be pressed into service
as a metaphor for something else.

They spoke in low voices over coffee –
who might be chosen?  Snake and Pig
prayed for the writer to be
politically motivated; Dog and Cat argued
for a sonnet on domestic abuse;
Wolf and Hawk, as always, took the
metaphysical angle and hoped
for someone with a natural bent
who could press them into 
aspirational role modeling.

When the door opened
and the poet beckoned 
it took them a moment 
to swarm him.  It wasn’t planned
but they were tired and damned
if anyone was going to be asked
to be anything other than what
they were.

This is the poem they ended up in
and they lived happily ever after –

well, perhaps it was not
ever after but for a moment
they were happy.

Not as happy
as they would have been 
if the poet had just offered
to put each of them into a haiku
without bending them
to human need at all,

but pretty happy.
For a while anyway.

 

The Apprenticeship System

How to begin?

Look at the ground, or something.
Find a bit of truth sticking out,
or notice something pretty.

(In fact,
let’s just start over and say
you should find “something”
and not worry too much about
pretty or true.  Just start
somewhere, with something.)

So…there, in the ground…something
pretty or true.  
Or both.  

Grab your shovel of choice,
and dig.  Dig it up and out.
Decide: more pretty, or more true? 

There are, allegedly, 
rules for measuring this difference.
Ignore them a while longer
and dig more — seek nuggets
to supplement the lacking side –
find unrelated somethings
to be used for alloy.

When you’re done, 
you should be standing
on a tiny peak
of undug ground,
standing next to
a pile of something
in the middle of an excavated pit. 

Throw yourself
off the peak into the pit,
end up face first
at the bottom of the pile.

Roll the wreck
of your body over
and look up.  That’s where
you came from.
You’re not there anymore
and the only way up
is to make a ladder out of all the 
pretty ugly false truth
you’ve accumulated.

Yes, this is how
we all began.

Ticket Punch

The agents 
on the road I travel
won’t punch my ticket,
though I offer them
the posted fare
of my poems.

What I do
is now, apparently,
invalid.

I’ve done it
all my life and now
I am not good at it,

or I never was
and no one said so,

or all I’ve done
is a mistake.  

It might be true –
I might have lost it –

I don’t match 
the demographics,
says one commenter.
I don’t pursue
the right goals,
says another.  
What I make
is false,
says another,
and does not count.

It’s likely past time
for me to pass, then?  
Time almost
to go and not resist,
gentle, etc., into the night
good or not;
turn off the light
on my writing desk
whether I go easy or hard
because this ain’t,
it just ain’t,
working. 

Ah,
say my poems,
buck up,
they’re looking for
suckups, and all they know
is their own
limitation.  
We can’t even see
a horizon
and we’re still on the hunt, 
are we not?

They’ll go on, my poems,
those cocky bastards,
with or without me,
without or with honors, 
validations, labels;
what I need now
I needed more long ago,
have gotten already,
at least in part.

As for the ticket punchers…

they stand there at a gate
that isn’t on a road
and there are broad open plains
on all sides…

I think I’ll just
go around. 

Slam Puppies and Search Dogs

used to be
I could treat the poems
like puppies — trained them
to sit up and beg
for your favor

pathetic 
those little shining eyes
turning over time
rock hard and obvious
in their need

now
I treat them
like search dogs

they track on their own
I follow
they’re lean
if they find you
good 
if not
I trust
they’ll find someone else

 

Poetry Lesson

If it comes
from a poet’s mouth
it is probably a lie,
unless it’s completely factual –

or unless it’s in between,
one of those stupid things
artists do all the time:
putting a bent frame
on a picture,
deliberately scarring themselves
just to fit in. 

Facts, lies,
damn lies,
statistics,
poetry:  every one
a method of dissembling
and all of them
sometimes used
to get at the truth.

What I mean to say:  
don’t trust any of us
unless the earth nods
at what we’re saying.
 
It may take a day or two
but you’ll know if and when
your old things settle into new places
after we’re done. 

 

Job Description

There are things that can only be said
in the language once used by a small boy
who grew up in southern Germany
thirty years ago,
who made the language up
in order to talk to his neighbor’s cat
when he was lonely,

who grew up to be
a father himself, an engineer
who today
has forgotten such a language existed
and only knows he has a deep affinity
for cats who peer into his eyes
as if he has something to say,
though he never does.  

There are things that can only be said
in a language now used
by boxes in shipping containers;
vital information for us all
is encoded in a dialect only spoken 
among the bones found in mass graves;
and there it is — the Secret, the actual 
Secret Key To All is being shouted
clearly but incomprehensibly
by the stones clacking into chorus,
tumbling toward the roadside of your commute
at mile 18, right behind the sign
that dismisses this revelation as, simply,
“Falling Rocks.”

If you want to know your job,
here it is:  memory translator.  
Interpreter of dialogues
no one ever suspected 
were happening.  
Revivalist
of past carnivals
and child’s play.

If you want to know
what it takes to do this,
you’re going to have
to get out of the car
at mile 18 and learn
to duck rocks, even if 
it makes you late for 
another job.  You
will have to sleep
among bones, 
take your meals
in a shippling container;

you will have to
learn German, stare at old 
German phone books, 
stalk numerous men hoping
they are that child today –

you will have to get a cat,
maybe a few cats –

and you must hurry, for
we’ve been waiting a long time.

 

 

Definition of Art

Definition of art: Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. (Robert Rauschenberg)

Take an object.

Do something to it.
Do something to it.
Leave yourself out of it.
Leave everyone out of it.

Take a manmade object.
Make it an animal.
Take an animal.
Make it a God.

Make something inanimate a God.
Just don’t use language
as a crutch.  Stay on message:
it’s God and no human
is of concern to it.

Spooning?  Leave it.
You don’t know the spoon well enough
to borrow its name.  Drop and give the spoon
twenty thousand words:  enough then, maybe,
if the spoon says so.  If it speaks somehow.

Stay on message.  God
is not a human concern.  Do
something to it.  Do something
to it.  Leave.

Do something
to yourself.  To yourself.
Then leave.  You are of no
human concern.  Art is the doing
of things to objects.  Not a
spin cycle goes by
when I don’t remember that –
put paint on the canvas, the teapots,
the broken parts of me, the do something
else to it: remove it.  Start at
washing.  That’s an art, eh?  A tough one.
You suck at it.

Take an object.
Do something.
Anything.  Do something except
blurt about your whiny puke of a life.
Do something to it instead:
leave.

 

Final Poem

In the backyard
my legacy:  a bonfire
of all the books
that explain me,

that made me
and that I then made.

In the house, empty shelves.

My directories and address books
torn apart on the floor.

Where are the pages and pages
of friends and family and contacts
and brownnosers and suckups
and slavish touchers and holders
of hem and knee?  Where are
the pages and pages of those 
I’ve groupied and touched?

Outside in the flames,
all the unwarranted names.

No scene, no family.
No crowdsourced art.
No more of this.

It’s going to be much easier now,
I tell myself. No more fires,
no more poems.  

I tell myself a lot of things.
One day I will in fact do something
to make what I say true.  
Today, I feel it’s closer
than it was yesterday.  That

will pull me through. 

The Sidewalks Outside The Poetry Readings

on every street where there’s a poetry reading
there is a sidewalk

and on it the rich folks stroll, the middle class folks 
hurry, and behind the windows the poor folks 

stand behind counters, behind bars,
behind the scenes,

and everyone looks a little bit lost,
a little bit scared, a little in a fog.

but in every reading everyone changes –
there are just poets there and people thinking about poetry 

so is it any wonder that in there we love
our detailed narratives and our persona poems

and our big broad stories told loud?  stepping outside –
bah, who wants to do that?  who among us here

in the warm hug of the poetry reading
ever wants to go back onto the sidewalk

with the rest of the foggy scared
lost rich poor middle class people?