Day #5, Poem #3:

Sometimes you catch the firefly,
and the words that come out
and hit the page
say exactly what you
meant.

Sometimes when you started
you knew where you were going
and sometimes you didn’t,
but you recognized it
the moment you got there.

Don’t try to catch the firefly-
fireflies can rarely be caught
by chasing them-
and the faster you chase,
the faster they flee.

Just leave the jam jar open,
and your thoughts
elsewhere,
and then snap the lid tight
when the moment comes.

#2, on the 4th.

A poem under construction is not a pretty sight.
There are piles of adverbs everywhere.
A pack of similes is arguing with the metaphors,
and the third stanza,
the sad one,
has disappeared entirely,
and we’ll probably get a call from a bar at 2 a.m.,
telling us it’s there, sobbing incoherently
about that cute blond couplet that was
cut from the poem two weeks ago.

A poem under construction is not a pretty sight.
That’s why we put the yellow tape up.
There’s nothing to see here,
nothing to gawk at.
Move along, move along.

Poem a Day #1

I was not going to do the "Poem-a-Day" in November, but then my neurotic fear of being left out kicked in, so I'll try it (first poem below). What you are going to see will be rougher than normal, because I usually do lot of editing, which there won't be time for in this exercise. Here we go-

Morning is Broken

In the beginning,
there was morning.
And morning was only me
and the dark
and the quiet
and the cat,
who didn’t even want her breakfast
yet-
only a scritch.

And then the breaking light,
and the gurgling coffee maker,
and the dry dishes in the drainer
to be put away.
But they were silent
as they were stacked.
They didn’t break the stillness.

And then the radio,
and the news and
talking heads
and then the computer and
email
and calendar reminders
and New York Times
and Weather Underground
and Facebook
and the day comes
barreling in -

and I’m not quite ready.
and then the message
that you had died.

And I’m not quite ready.

and i retreat.

in the beginning,
there was morning.
and morning was only me.

Not a Poet-

I am a not, nor have I ever been, a Poet.
That’s a lie.
All Poets lie.
We hide a thesaurus under the couch pillow-
We erase our browser history so you’ll never know
that we visited WikiPoetry dot com.
We run rhymes under our breath
when we think you’re not listening.

But there is no hiding who we really are.
There’s a paperback volume of Robert Frost
in the kitchen cabinet, behind the Wheat Chex,
and when you find it I’ll say
“I thought it was a book about the weather”,
and you’ll shake your head and drop it in the trash
and that’s ok, because I have another one
hidden in the back of my desk drawer at the office.

But there’s no use trying to hide who we are.
People know.
Yeah -they know.
They notice when I watch Jeopardy with them,
and when the returning champion
doesn’t know that T.S. Eliot’s magnum opus was
The Waste Land,
and I start jumping up and down on the couch
screaming “You fucking moron!”
-Yeah, people notice stuff like that.

I try to lie my way out-
“I’m just a geek”, I tell them,
“A nerd, a know-it-all, a literary snob.
- I’m one of the English Majors
Garrison Keilor is always going on about.”

"Sure", they say-
“Who was that woman you were
talking about last week,
the one with the funny initials?”
And before I can stop myself I reply
“You mean Hilda Doolittle?
H.D.? The Imagist poet
who wouldn’t fuck D.H. Lawrence?”
Well fuck.

Yeah, they always know.
People say it’s ok,
they say they don’t really care,
they say THEY don’t judge-
but then whenever I’m at a party
and I take anything out of my pocket,
even the smallest scrap of paper,
that looks vaguely as if it might be a poem-
everyone suddenly finds some other person
they need to talk to.

Yeah, they always know.

“You just need to accept who you are”,
one friend told me,
“Don’t over-think it, don’t fret”.

Don’t fret?

I’m a poet.
-telling me not to fret
is like telling a golden retriever
to ignore that squirrel.

I fret, therefor I am.

Where the fuck do you think
I get all my material?

So fine-
I am, and have always been, a Poet.
Happy now?
I hide a thesaurus under the couch pillow-
I erase my browser history so you’ll never know
that I visited WikiPoetry dot com this morning.
I run rhymes under my breath
when I think you’re not listening.
I might even write a poem
about this conversation-
“Don’t do that”, you say,
and I say “OK, I won’t”,
but I lie,
All poets lie.
And then I run to get a piece of paper.

Words-

We each have inside of us a well,
a reservoir,
of words never spoken-
and it’s filled with words we could have said,
it’s filled with words we would have said,
it’s filled with words we maybe should have said,
-but didn’t.

some of the “could have” saids
were better off dumped down the well.
For instance-

“Well yes, since you ask,
that dress does make your butt look big”.

“Frankly, I never thought size mattered?
but that’s really small!”

but other words that went into the well
probably shouldn’t have-

“Hey, you guys, stop teasing Billy!”

“Nobody invites Sue to their parties,
but I want to invite her to mine”.

“I feel like I’m different from other kids,
and that scares me, sometimes”.

“Don’t hit her!”

“Please don’t drink”.

And sometimes we sit around later,
and look at the unspoken words
we threw down the well,
and we can only think,
“Wow, I’m stupider than a bag of rocks.”

Take a look at these-

“Um, Julie? Would you go to the dance with me on Saturday?”

“I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,
but I don’t think Tom should be out on that limb
with the chainsaw”.

“I know the tickets are expensive,
but who knows when Amy Winehouse
will be performing here again.”

And the well will never fill up,
because the more unspoken words we put in it,
the deeper it gets-

“Your dad hasn’t been looking well lately,
maybe we should go visit him this weekend?”

“Mary’s had way too much to drink,
I don’t think we should let her drive home like that”.

“Hey, David, you seem really down,
and I just wanted to call and make sure you’re ok,
do you want to talk about anything?”

We each have inside of us a well,
a reservoir,
of words never spoken,
and it’s filled with words we could have said-

“The dirty dishes can wait,
come sit with me on the couch for a while”,

it’s filled with words we would have said -
“I was wrong, and I’m sorry”,

it’s filled with words we maybe should have said-
“I love you.”

-but didn’t.

If I Were a Rock-

According to a Buzzfeed Quiz I took
on Facebook, I am 95% Awesome.
My wife assures me the quiz is flawed
Not as flawed as I am,
but flawed, nonetheless.

According to a Gawker Quiz
I took on Facebook,
if I were a rock
I’d be an igneous rock.
I find this a bit troubling,
not only because I’d always thought
of myself as being more sedimentary,
but because it means I will now have to remember
how to spell igneous.

At various points in my life I have taken
meditation courses,
and Mindfullness training,
I’ve been therapied and psychoanalyzed,
but never before have I approached
the level of self-awareness
that these internet quizzes I see on Facebook
are giving me.

If I were a precious stone
What precious stone would I be?
Ruby.

If I were a dog
what dog would I be?
Shitzu. 
- Sure, my wife says,
they got that half right.

If I were a Peanuts character
which peanuts character would I be?
Schroeder.

At a certain point, though,
I began to doubt the insight these quizzes
were giving me.

If I was  a vegetable,
what vegetable would I be?
might tell me something about myself
(I was hoping for asparagus,
but got potato.
Yeah, I know).

But, if I was moss
what kind of moss would I be?
just doesn’t seem to be speaking
to the issues facing me
in today’s 21st century world.

What 1970s television sitcom character
would I be?
seemed to be about to give me great insight,
until it turned out that I’d be Marcia,
 from the Brady Bunch.

Likewise, finding out that
if I were a Snapple flavor,
I’d be crabapple cranberry,
well, that might be a bit
too close to the truth.

I quit doing these quizzes
when it turned out that if I were
a Japanese vending machine,
I’d be dispensing
designer condoms
in packets featuring the faces
 of champion sumo wrestlers.

I found that deeply disturbing,
yet somehow oddly intriguing,
so I decided to quit while I was ahead.
I am, after all,
a 95% awesome
igneous rock potato
with the personality of Marcia Brady.
And knowing all that,
how much more personal insight
can I really afford ?

Camp-

This summer I spent a month at Poetry Boot Camp.
It was Hell.

We stayed in dorms named after famous poets.
The women got the Emily Dickinson Cottage.
It was great for them-
Fresh eggs from local chickens at breakfast every morning.
Tea and scones served by shirtless Italian waiters
every afternoon at 3.

The men were packed into the Bukowski Barracks.
We were only given two hours sleep each night,
not allowed to shower,
and fed a straight diet of ham sandwiches and beer.
They pumped so much beer into us
that by the third day
you could have taken my piss,
bottled it,
put it on the supermarket shelf,
labeled it ‘Coors’,
and nobody could have told the difference.

We started each day with drills.
There was a Spoken Word Breath Control drill
where you had to repeat your name ten times
without stopping to breath.
Tom Dix won that every day.
I had a Spanish friend,
Pablo Suarez de Jesus Escondido Maria Montoya Escalan de Gama,
 - he almost died.

The drill sergeants were all
named after Beat Poets.
You didn’t mess with the one we called Ginsburg.
If you made a mistake, he made you talk
the rest of the day using haiku.
Yoda Haiku.
Excuse me-
Haiku, spoke we in,
As if Yoda we were... oy.
Easy, not, it was.

There were games-
An Adverb Scavenger Hunt.
Pin the Simile on the Metaphor.
Spin the Hyperbole.
If you fucked THAT up
Ginsburg hit you on the head
with a copy of
The Collected Works of Rod McKuen.

Then the Slam Team Trainers came for us.
Their motto was,
“We Put The Slam in Slamming”.
They had arm bands featuring
the velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
We jogged to and from every class,
shouting Kill! Kill! Kill!
at the top of our lungs
in iambic pentameter.

They taught us to achieve the mindset
of the Professional Poetry Slammer-
“You are my opponent.
I admire your work and wish you luck.
I applaud your every victory,
I will crush you like a bug”.

At Graduation we had to get our diplomas
by running over a 20-foot long bed of
fiery, red hot consonants.
I got a Q stuck between my toes and
couldn’t walk for a week.

This summer I spent a month at Poetry Boot Camp,
and it was Hell.
But why am I standing here
telling you all about it?
The next session starts in an hour-
the buses are waiting outside-
So saddle up, poets!
The Dickinson Cottage
and Bukowski Barracks
are waiting for you!

(Almost) Awesome-

You know how sometimes you write something
and you’re sure that it’s just fucking awesome?
You’re sitting there and all at once
the words just poop out of your fingers
and stain the pages with your brilliance?
When that happens to me
after I’ve finished I sit back,
satisfied and satiated,
and I want to puff a cigarette
like Bogie when he gets done fucking Bacall
for the first time.

And I am drunk with the glory of it
and I want to take my brilliant piece
and share it
and email it
and Facebook it
and blog it
and go down to the street
and accost some innocent passerby
with it.

But some inner voice deep down,
the same voice that could have spared
me that wicked hangover after
last saturday night’s party,
that one little inner shred of common sense
that hasn’t been mercilessly bludgeoned to death
by my brilliance,
that little voice says, “wait”,
and just this once, I listen.

And so I plant the poem away in my desk,
like a sunflower seed in a
paper cup filled with peat moss,
like the perfect Christmas gift,
October-wrapped and hidden
on the top shelf
of the back hallway closet,
and I sneak a peek every once in a while
all afternoon, just to reassure myself
that my brilliance isn’t going anywhere.

And then I get up the next morning,
and I make myself make coffee,
and check my email,
and put the dried dishes in the drainer away,
and feed the cat,
and then,
then-
I collect my poem
from its safe place,
and I look at it
in the fresh day,
and I read it over,
and I think,

“What the fuck?!?!?!?”

Yeah-
you know how sometimes
it’s like that?

Names-

What’s in a name?
You would think naming poems would be simple. Not for me.
When I was in high school I thought it was clever
to name my poems like the painter,
James McNeill Whistler, named his paintings-
His “Nocturne in Blue & Gold” led to my
“Symphony in White for Adjectives”,
and “An Arrangement in Adverbs #14”.
I did that until a girl I liked commented,
“That’s stupid”.
I couldn’t disagree.
So I took “Nocturne #37 in Metaphorical Greys”,
tore it up,
and avoided poetry altogether for the next decade.

And yet, I never quite learn.
When I started writing again, my poem
about a panhandler who gets
flattened by a bus on 12th Street was titled 
“Incident at 44th and 6th”.
You probably don’t need a map, the intersection
of 44th and 6th is nowhere near 12th in any city
(math majors got that right away).

There’s my poem about swing dancing under the stars
which concludes with the stanza,
“Then come and sit awhile with me,
under the black-boned maple tree,
under the proud black canopy, of January sky.
Come sit and watch,
as stars fly by,
that velvet January sky,
a swarm of winter fireflies,
not yet entombed in some glass jar”.
I titled this poem about January skies,
“With You and Duke Ellington at Christmas”.

-it took me eight years
to notice that there was a problem.

And yet, I love naming my poems.
Well, some of my poems-
I’ve got a drawer full of great titles for
poems I haven’t actually written yet.


“Reading Charles Bukowski at a
 New Britain Rock Cats Minor League Baseball Game”.
I may not have a poem to go with it-
But damn, I like the title.

I’ve got titles attached to partial-poems; semi-poems...
about-to-be-started-someday poems-
“Who Pissed on the Lilacs?” will be my homage to Walt Whitrman,
if I ever get around to writing it.
“Bad Marmalade, and Other Journeys to the Dark Side of the Fridge”,
may eventually be finished, but I never get more than a stanza in
before I have to break for a snack.

“The Raven Revisited: A Caustic Letter to the Audubon Society”,
actually got a funding grant from PETA,
but they pulled the money when they found out
that on line 37 I described the Raven as
“Nothing more than a fuzzy-balled birdshit factory”.

But sometimes I learn-
there are certain words and phrases to avoid in titles
if you’re going to post your poem on the internet.
For instance- You may have lots of cats,
but don’t name your poem about them
“Pussies Galore”.
A project with an animal rights group taught me
that when posting a poem online
about the evils of pit-fighting roosters,
it’s probably best to avoid the phrase “Cock-Fight”.
Unless, you know, you’re looking for interesting experiences.
 - I’m not judging.

It might seem my attempts at poem-naming
are all destined for disappointment,
But I read recently that “Disappointment “
is just a mis-spelling of “Opportunity”.
(I’m not sure how they make that work,
the words don’t look the same, but never mind).
So in an effort to boost my website stats
right now I’m working on a new poem
that takes advantage of all the lessons I’ve learned.
It’s titled “Pussies Galore at the Cock Fight”.
Oh please! It’s a poem about my cats.
Really- it’s a poem about my cats.
Ok... it’s not about my cats.

Questions, Answers-

Trotted this completely revised and re-wired piece out at the Open Mic before last night's Poetry Slam at NoHo Poetry-

-

People are always asking me
(well, all right, once last year somebody asked me) -
What’s the difference between Traditional  Poetry,
Spoken Word Narrative Poetry, and Slam Poetry?
The answer I gave to that question
was certainly influenced by how many beers I’d had,
and the fact that I, a Spoken Word Poet,
had just been dumped by a Slam Poet.
Here’s what I said-

A Traditional Poem features clever allusions
and carefully-wrought phrases about things
that are never what they seem to be.
You may be introduced to horses
banging copper pipes with clouds
fashioned from the heartbreak of their hopes
as they puff on cigars wrapped
with the shreds of our sorrow.
At first none of this may make any sense to you,
-but if you wait, you’ll find the horses
had a damned good reason for all that banging...
-or, at the very least, they were provoked.

A Spoken Word Narrative poem eschews allusion
and avoids complicated metaphor
in favor of a more straightforward presentation-
in a Spoken Word poem, for instance,
horses will never eschew allusions,
or illusions,
and they certainly don’t smoke anything.

A Slam Poem walks out on stage
and kicks you in the nuts.
Wicked hard.
And you’ll like it.
-
As you may by now have gathered,
a Traditional Poem about a horse
is not really about a horse-
the horse stands in as a metaphor
for freedom, or loyalty, or endless toil,
and you, the reader, are asked to figure it out,
or simply to think to yourself-
Wow, that’s a multi-talented horse.

A Spoken Word Narrative poem about the horse
will actually be about the horse,
and the poet’s relationship to the horse,
though the horse may, eventually,
be seen to stand as a deeper metaphor
for some other facet of life,
which the poet will explain to you.

In a Slam Poem about a horse,
the horse walks out on stage,
and kicks its rider in the nuts.
Wicked hard.
-
A Traditional Poem appeals to your Intellect.
It asks you to unlock its secrets one by one,
to unravel the metaphor thread by thread,
to come to the same place in the end as the poet,
or perhaps not, horses being what they are,
as sillabub cup dancers spin
on clouds banks of furrowed dreams
in the graveyard speaking only to me.
That last sentence, by the way, illustrates
why I don’t often venture to write Traditional Poetry.

A Spoken Word Narrative Poem appeals to your emotions,
-it communicates with the audience on a more
prosaic level. It can be every bit as lyrical as a Traditional poem,
but if it talks about sillabub cups
it usually really means a tiny silver cup to drink
fortified spiced wine out of.

A Slam Poem will buy you a drink
before it kicks you in the nuts.
Wicked hard.
And you’ll like it.

Open mic, July 29

Read something new at last night's NoHo Poetry Open Mic-



Today the New York Times said that Poetry is dead.
I never even had time to tell Poetry that I loved her.

Today the National Enquirer revealed that Poetry is not dead.
Today the National Enquirer revealed that Poetry’s brain
was put into a state of suspended animation by The New Yorker in 1997,
and you can get secret messages from Poetry by playing
Sara Bareilles audio files backwards.

I want to play Poetry’s audio files backwards.
I want to tell Poetry that I love her.
I want to have Hot Poet Sex with Poetry
on the floor of T.S. Elliot’s kitchen.

Today, the Today Show said nothing about Poetry.
Today, Good Morning America said nothing about Poetry.
Today, Morning Edition was going to say something
about Poetry, but the piece got kicked off the schedule
at the last minute by a breaking story about Fracking.

I’m not sure what fracking is...
-but it sounds like something I’d like to do with Poetry.

If I die in a Flanders Field, I want it to be for Poetry.
If I strike out in the 9th with the bases loaded
plunging Mudville into a century of shame and despair,
I want to have been struck out by Poetry.
If two roads diverge in a yellow wood and I take the wrong one?
-I want to have been mis-directed by Poetry.

I want to produce the hot new cable show, Haiku Tonight.
I want to host the long-running television game show, Wheel of Sonnets.
I want to fund an NPR show called All Poems Considered.
I want Alex Trebek to demand in his next contract
that Jeopardy have a Poetry category every night,
-and I want to write the questions.

I want to tell Poetry that I love her.
I want to play Poetry’s audio files backwards.
I want to fuck Poetry until she’s completely satisfied,
and I want to lie there, exhausted, still wanting to give more,
to Poetry.

The (in)Correct Note-

Ripped this old poem open, put in a new transmission and upgraded the OS, and trotted the revised edition back out at last night's Open Mic-

 
As a child I spent a lot of my time
worrying about making mistakes-
I was that nerdy kid who forgot a homework assignment
exactly once in twelve years of primary education,
and then seriously contemplated changing my name
and running off to Canada rather than tell my
parents I’d been kept after school because of it.
It was Mrs. Winters’ 7th grade Social Studies class,
March 12, 1975, by the way, and the assignment
was draw an imaginary animal of the future
and describe how it evolved from a currently-existing animal...
Not that I dwell on it or anything.

As an adult I’ve tried to shake out of that habit.
I’ve worked very hard to feel ok about doing
things in ways other people see as wrong-
And I work hard at it because, of course,
when it comes to being ok about being wrong,
there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

“There’s really no such thing as the *correct* note”-
That’s a new self-help mantra
I’ve been repeating over and over to myself-
One evening recently
while attending a community theater production
of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance”
I watched as the lead soprano put that theory into practice.

Yes- there were some notes on the page
which Sir Arthur Sullivan had *suggested* she sing-
but the young woman seemed to take those
as an affront to her own ingenuity.
“Sure”, she was obviously thinking to herself,
“Those are the notes THEY want me to sing-
But I’ll show them!”

Did she have a point?
Ask any man who has put together a gas grill or
piece of IKEA furniture, and he will tell you-
instructions are at best a list of suggestions.
Yes, there were seven bolts, five nuts
and this oddly-shaped metal rod left over
when I finished,
but the grill fires up,
so how important could they be?

As the years have passed I’ve kept trying to hit
just the right note, and often missed,
and I’ve finally decided to take the advice
my high school guidance counselor gave me-
“If you can’t live your life as a good example for some,
at least proudly serve as a warning to others”.

There’s some solace in the fact that
many of art and poetry’s successes
spent their careers hitting the wrong note-
and one day people decided it wasn’t the wrong note after all
-and some of those artists and poets were even still alive to enjoy it.
But of course, many of art and poetry’s never-were’s
also spent their careers hitting the wrong note-
and in the end everybody just asked:
What the fuck was he thinking????

You play your notes and hope somebody else
will dance along with the tune,
and if you’re lucky, nobody throws tomatoes at you.
And you think the song will go on forever,
but of course it won't.
One morning people will wake up
and start talking about you in the past tense,
and when you’re in the past tense
you’ve walked through a door,
and you can never go back.

So lately I’ve begun to worry less
about right notes and wrong notes-
and I just keep hitting *some* note, like
that golden-haired Pirates of Penzance soprano;
she may have had Sir Arthur Sullivan
spinning like a top in his grave-
but even if she wasn’t technically faithful to the score,
her interpretation of it
was at least strikingly original.

Critics-

I come here tonight to criticize Blue Man Group.
I HATE BLUE MAN GROUP!!
“All right”, I can hear some of you thinking,
“Has he ever seen Blue man Group?”
Well, of course not.
I HATE Blue man Group,
why would I want to -see- them?
It would be a gigantic waste of everyone’s time.

I come here tonight to trash Dan Brown’s novels.
It’s true that I’ve never -read- any of his novels,
why would I? They’re trash.
A certain red-haired literature professor I know says so.
My taste in novels may be lacking,
but my taste in red-haired literature professors
is pretty spot-on.
So I come here tonight to trash Dan Brown’s novels.

I come here tonight to share with you
my loathing for the seed of the Chia.
Growing up, I pestered my parents for one of those Chia pets
I saw advertised on late-night tv.
Seeing the seed of these noble animals
sold by supermarkets now is a bit confusing to me.
I’ve never actually -eaten- a chia seed-
going by what a Chia pet looks like,
I think it would be like eating the coat
of my neighbor’s pet poodle.
Or, if you are familiar with one of the Chia Company’s
slightly more disturbing popular products,
It would be like eating an old albino man’s fuzzy green fright wig.
To paraphrase the popular song lyric-
I’ll eat anything for love-
But I won’t eat THAT.

Ignorant disdain used to be a uniquely American trait,
but I’ve noticed lately that people in other countries are becoming
just as good at hating things they don’t understand as we are.
In a way that disturbs my competitive instinct.
On the other hand, a carefully cultivated contempt
for those things we find utterly inscrutable
does explain why everybody dislikes the French.

To hate what you don’t know anything about
remains one of America’s great contributions to mankind.
I know that viewpoint has its critics.
They go on and on,
in big, scholarly books that I’ve never read,
about how America’s founders,
like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin
loved knowledge and understanding,
and valued everyone’s point of view.
Well I have one thing to say to those scholars-
Tom Jefferson and John Adams and Ben Franklin
would have happily joined me
in trashing Dan Brown’ novels,
loathing the seed of the Chia,
and hating Blue Man Group!

A Spoken Word Poem-

My spoken word poem
is three minutes long,
 and into it I will scatter anecdote and wordplay,
metaphor and simile,
a sprinkling of adverbs,
and just enough of myself to sound sincere
while making the audience ever so slightly uncomfortable.

My spoken word poem will begin
by introducing the main theme of the poem,
cleverly mixed with a topical observation of the fact
that it is summer and damned hot outside-
that can of course be switched to winter
and damned cold outside later and well,
I guess I just won’t read the thing at all
in the Spring and the Fall.

With two minutes to go
my spoken word poem will get back on track
with an anecdote that sounds true but probably isn’t,
because the fact is
that if you are looking for facts in most of my poems
you might as well just go ask the cat,
and everybody knows what a liar she is.

With a minute to go
my spoken word poem will get
a bit muddled and confusing,
because it was four minutes long when I first wrote it
and I had to cut 20 lines late last night.
That was just after Terry found that stash
of purple microdot in a old Grateful Dead album,
and the rest of the night is a bit blurry-
I do know that it involved giant orange & blue carnivorous mice.
Around 5 a.m. I panicked
 and cut out all of stanzas 6, 7, and 8.
  I can’t remember what was in any them,
  - but they may have been important.

With thirty-seconds to go
my spoken word poem suddenly gets
Very. Very. Serious. And Quiet.
And I stand here hoping that my point was deftly made,
and driven home with eloquence and wit-
Leaving one remaining issue-
Where the fuck is my beer?

Poetry is a Contact Sport

Poetry is a contact sport.
Words slide off the page and crash in flames to the ground.
Hearts pound with the thrill of victory,
and break with the agony of defeat,
and the crowd goes wild.

Pity the poor poets their insecurities-
No multi-year contracts or signing bonuses here.
In the Poetry League
its write and recite, or die.
Connect- or sit down, alone,
at the sad end of the bar.

All-Star poets will tell you
They’re just glad to be here,
Just trying to give their all, help the team out,
Playing it one poem at a time.
Working every night to find
yet another meaningful way
to be thoughtful, thought-provoking,
intense, insightful, inspired,
and ever-so-slightly ambiguous.

Journeyman poets roam the League,
Slamming for anyone who will buy them a beer,
Waking up in a strange bed each morning,
checking the web each night
to make sure they haven’t been traded to Shreveport.
The Poetry Scene in Shreveport is a little odd.
Nobody wants to get traded to Shreveport.

Young rookie poets
strut their poetic chops everywhere,
to anyone who stands still long enough to listen.
Absolutely anyone-
“Well thank you, that sure is a nice poem”,
the stranger replies, slightly bewildered,
“But really, did you want fries with that?”


Old poets never die,
they just rest on their rhymes,
sip their beers,
and twitch uncomfortably,
when fresh-faced Young Turk poets
rapidly recite all hundred forty-seven synonyms
for the physical act of making hot poet love
  which they have painstakingly memorized
  and can recall in absolute alphabetical order
  without ever stopping to take a breath-
    Pause, exhale,
and then do it all over again.
In Klingon.

But times, they are a changin’-
Drug tests are coming-
tests for drugs, alcohol, too much caffeine.
Test clean once -30 day suspension.
Test clean three times-
your Poetic License is revoked.

Hey, Poetry is a contact sport.
Words slide off the page and crash in flames to the ground.
Hearts pound with the thrill of victory,
and break with the agony of defeat,
and the crowd goes wild.