(you can’t imagine)
I am arrogant
(sweetheart)
I am
(you can’t)
arrogant of my imagination
(imagine, sweetheart)
Even though it is where you put everything
(you can)
around me, you said
You can’t imagine, sweetheart
and I realize
(sweetheart)
that you are arrogant as well.
This poem is part of a series of poems I’ve written in parody of Charles Bukowski’s Friendly Advice to A Lot of Young Men. Also see Friendly Advice To Charles Bukowski.
___
Go to a football game.
Drink a beer.
Lift weights and eat protein.
Show off your muscles.
Imagine all the places that baseball has been.
Be a man.
Wear lipstick.
Show off your figure.
Paper mache your boobs.
Wear something with flowers on it.
Start a garden
And give some of it away.
Sew a short dress for yourself.
And stab yourself in the eye with a knitting needle.
Watch the way the snow falls on a sleeping bird
The way the sun shines through a wine glass
Or write an outrageously cliché poem about holding hands.
Run for mayor
But don’t forget to write a poem about it.
Just because you can.
Straight from the mouth
of mister roller derby guru himself:
it feels like you are the last hornet in the world
buzzing with this white hot desperation
your whole life
and you’ve finally realized
that there’s nothing left to do
but fly around.
a sidewalk girl
remembers recent muggings
and walks in the clacky way
of someone wearing
out-of-their-league boots.
Boots that say Fashion is coming
or that you might be a teacher
Boots that say No my basement is not infested with ants
And yes I am allowed to keep candles in my room.
Boots that lie.
Boots that will lie in a crumpled pile
beside student shoes
later that night
if she makes it home.
A sidewalk girl looks into your window
as you drive past
and then looks behind her shoulder
at nothing
and you think I wonder where she’s going
and imagine the kind of glamour
that must accompany knee-high boots
and long brown hair.
A ball. A winter ball, in the park
violins and steam and
knee-high boot dancing
and midnight star kissing and
You forget to see that she’s nervous
and choose not to notice her backpack.
She’s long gone now of course
twirling among snowflakes.
A sidewalk girl
carries a half full stomach
on her back
Feels it clack against her
and thinks she would hear
the sloshings of whiskey and wine
if it weren’t for the monstrosity
of her boot lies.
Later she sits on the floor
and imagines where the SUV man
thought she was going tonight.
Silence is eraser shavings.
It is the space in-between a smile and a goodbye. A word and the page it is no longer on.
Silence is a mouth interrupted. A hug halfway through. An arm around the waist for a second.
It is the last three words of a sentence cut short. Because no one was listening anyway.
Silence is an unsent letter.
It is signing your name by listening too hard.
Silence is a siren on what must be a busy street, the clatter of what must’ve been a misplaced dish, the beep beep beep of a dial tone.
Silence is when you hear the most
Because you’re listening so hard
For something else.
he told me to
Stop thinking in full sentences
he said
Fragments, darling
We’re in a new era now.
In response I thought
How do I stop thinking
or writing for that matter
in full sentences?
He laughed
because he knew that I was
already spinning a poem about
this conversation; that I knew
that he knew
He told me to
at least leave it unpunctuated
to let my (impossibly) full sentences
tickle each other
bleed on each other
sit in the corner and read to each other
and you know damn well
about the semicolons
my dear, you know damn well
that they belong in handwritten letters
trying to be fancy
and instruction manuals
with bad editors.
Okay. Dear.
Here are some fragments for you, my darling, my dearest, that guy who sees everything clearest:
a smear of ketchup on your bedside table
crumbs from grilled cheese crust
The chipped paint on your ceiling?
Looks like leprosy.
Write about that.
folding the corners down on my books
and losing my bookmarks
cracking your knuckles
curtains always drawn
as if you should be keeping the gloriousness of your dank little room to yourself
never letting me read the second half of my own poetry
never writing something with a comma in it!
Wash your own dishes
you scab
Throw out your own crust
Write an epitaph about it.
And don’t forget to
get a damn copyright.
To a poet
each unique snowflake
might scream
“I am a cliche”
I am a cliche.
But to a tree
the snow is a gentle
finger-press
shushing what was about
to be a chilly complaint.
To the rest of us
snow is the kind of fairy dust
that makes you see sound
forcing us to become
synthetes
the snow is a white silence
and each of our sniffles an
obstruction
We cannot speak the same
in snowfall forests
the trees have been shushed
and we are forced to watch our words
we walk with our mouths open
to leave a trail of billow breath
and perhaps
to catch a bit of silence on our tongues.
I become a library
in my
sudden bursts of shyness
All of my thoughts
all of those pages bound together
edgy one by one
on their own they are as sharp as
a finger pointing to a part of the map that
falls off the page
But softness becomes them
bound and lost in each other:
A closed book can’t give anyone a paper cut.
When I am shy I am a collection
of everything I am
And there is no lexicon for silence
Sometimes it’s hard to know
where to begin in a library, I
know that. I know that there is
Such voluptuousness in the shy
Such a hardcover wall
Such a virgin spine
uncracked,
and remarkably unmarked
in the shy.
Go to the washroom.
Clean your hands.
Accidentally lose that girl’s number down the drain.
Write poetry.
Stumble onto a bus at 2am.
Make a 5 minute friend.
Pretend to be in love for a moment.
If you write poetry to be understood.
To find a lover.
Or worst of all to get famous.
Young man, don’t write poetry.
Go to Tibet.
But
If you can
sense a hiccup
in a line break or
an epiphany in the way
this stanza matches
the stain on
your shirt
Or
If your way of understanding this ripped up
world of ours is to turn it into words
Then fuck Chuck, swear without apology
(Apologize for everything else)
And write a damn poem.
However
If your way of understanding the world
is to run naked on a foreign beach at noon:
Take off your shirt.
But don’t forget to wear sunscreen.
___
This poem is part of an ongoing series I’m writing in response to Charles Bukowski’s Friendly advice to a lot of young men.
A blog by someone who believes you can pave your way through life with words.
