Sunday, January 15

I got up Saturday morning
and wrote poems in my composition book.
I called a book COMPOSITIONS once.
In Women, when Bukowski would read,
he'd be met by a junior faculty member
or a graduate student on the event committee,
taken to his lodgings, escorted to the venue,
driven to the party afterwards, where he would
show his ass, drinking, get in a fist-fight, puke,
hit on coeds. Fuck a woodpile in case
there was a snake in it. Act the part. Act out.
There ought to be a sign for my car window saying
Warning: Poet On Board. As I write poems
in heavy traffic in a tropical downpour.
The biggest threat I am is to the language.

I call myself a forensic philologist.
There could be a TV series.
Poet analyzes lies and bullshit.
Political propaganda and commercial
advertisements. An obsessive compulsive (OC)
personality. A lollipop. A wrinkled trenchcoat.
Carry on, nurse. A daffodil. An active volcano.
A geyser. Thar she blows. A bitter literary also-ran
(B. L. A. R.). A sperm whale. A tattooed harpoonist.
Call me Ishmael.

I have two hours to fill.
An audience to entertain.
Will there be an audience?
Will I rise to the occasion?
Sometimes I am captivating.
Sometimes I am flat.
It walks, it talks,
it crawls on its belly
like a reptile.
It is a side-show freak.
A geek. Biting the heads off chickens.

In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, -- I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, -- that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Melville to Hawthorne

I watch television.
That is, I gun through the channels
with my remote, slack-jawed.
I drool. My upper lip palpitates.
A sign of mental inferiority.
I have attention deficit disorder.
Or is it post-traumatic stress syndrome?
Battle fatigue? Shell shock?
Remain a writer, forsake advancement,
fight burn-out. How? Once the damage is done,
you can't revive the innocence. You're jaded. Listless.
Aged. The restless urge to write has left. It wasn't stillborn,
it was murdered. Even a bad writer needs a certain amount
of encouragement and support from friends and loved ones,
colleagues. Are we not a community or poets?
I can no longer suspend my disbelief.
I was rode hard and put away wet
one time too often. Worn away by
the constant attrition of the wood, that is,
the nutmeg. Call me Herman.

Jack Neff once said to me,
"You know how they say that when you drown,
your whole life passes before your eyes?"
I said I'd heard that. "Well, that happens to me
every morning when I get up."
He didn't commit suicide.
Lung cancer got him.
But he was a sad person.
He was like George M. Kaufman.
Funny. But his humor had an edge.
A dark side to it. The Greek word
for tragedy translates goat-song.

The Greek word for ostracize is from potsherd.
Used in the balloting. Ostracism tantamount
to death in primitive societies. And no bed of roses
in our own. Also, the Roman magistrate who took the census
was called the censor. There is thus a normative component
to what is banned and what is hailed. It's a popularity contest.
The hoi polloi demanding the gladiator's death. Or sparing him,
whimsically almost. Rumor, fear, and the madness of crowds.
Extraordinary popular delusions. All a man can do is look to
the lodestar and create. What happens to it is out of his hands.
St. John's College names a Miss Sophrosune. Could that be true?
Do I remember it, or did I make it up? What has college got to do
with life after graduation? What exactly does it prepare you for?
Turf wars and bickering. Office politics. Tinhorns and whited sepulchers.
Red necks, white socks, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. I look like Li'l Abner
in my brogans. Owen wore them to patch my roof, and the asphalt shingles
gave them use-polish a Japanese would call shibui. I'm not a cynic,
I'm just old. Too tired to spread it around. I can still cut the mustard,
but what's the use. And one Japanese word. I'm multicultural.