some secondhand thoughts

saving time from what?
what unspeakable evil
is it that besets time
that it needs rescuing so?

time-saving aids are
promised us
as lifelines to
a better life

but what if I should
prove unworthy
and time should
perish on my watch?

The Golden Art

Original artwork by Lorem Ipsum 2014

I can’t exactly confess to having been afflicted with writer’s block this past year. For instead it’s truer to say I had totally given up on being a writer altogether.

Ironically, however, the circumstances leading to my complete abandonment of my craft, I believe, make for an interesting enough story, on reflection.

After having seen my debut novel sink beneath the waves of global public indifference, it was suggested to me I seek guidance in the form of mentoring from an already established writer.

And as an example of the adage “careful what you wish for”, through a series of seemingly synchronistic events, I soon managed to make contact with one of this country’s more celebrated and awarded writers.

What thrilled me most of all was the fact that this writer in question also claims to have been largely inspired to write by the very same 17th century alchemist I myself have been. Too mind-blowingly cool!

Anyway, now the story gets a little bit more complicated. Because my first real contact with this writer is actually with his wife. An amazing experience in itself. For, literally two or three days earlier, I had quite by chance read the book of poems written for her by her future husband to be, with which he had first wooed her. And now here was this great writer’s muse standing before me — in the hallowed recesses of his writing studio no less — sharing intimate details of the intervening 40 years of their married lives together.

“I think he really is happy at last,” she confessed to me, “now that he has decided to stop writing.”

It was the usual story. There’s no money in it anymore, the dumbing down of the reading public, the all-pervasive curse of political correctness. This is a man after all that can recite whole cantos of classical poems in their original Latin, from memory. I mean, I feel stupid even thinking of myself as a writer worthy of the name in comparison.

So I listen to how this great luminary has finally decided to call it quits and feel all conviction drain from my body. Still, I leave my details with his wife and arrange for a time when it would be convenient for me to make contact with the man I wished to be my writing mentor.

Soon afterwards, I do in fact next have a telephone conversation with the man himself. Although the problem is that I can’t seem to clarify whether he thinks he is going to mentor me as an apprentice alchemist or as a failed novelist. Argggh, it’s all so hopeless! I don’t know what the hell’s going on.

“Look, it’s very hard to talk about these things abstractly,” he says, “but I’ve got a book of essays coming out next month that explains everything. Give me your address and I’ll send you a copy. Read that, and then we can start from there.”

Fine. I’m totally confused. Not least because his wife has just told me he has quit writing, and yet now I’m informed he apparently has a new collection of essays coming out. Also, I don’t know if I’m ready to start an apprenticeship as a real-life alchemist any time soon.

A month passes. Nothing. No book of essays comes my way. Just as I suspected. The whole thing was an elaborate lie to brush me off. Okay, so this writer is no JD Salinger when it comes to reclusive writer types, but he’s not exactly the kind to hold literary soirées either. All right fine. I give up, I think to myself. Being a writer simply isn’t worth it. What’s more, I’ve made a complete golden ass of myself with this whole mentoring debacle already.

Two months pass. Three, four, five. Still nada. I turn my attention to honing my guitar playing skills, swearing to never write another stinking word. Alchemy is for the birds. What delusional world had I been living in? Synchronicity? Oh, brother!

Seven, eight, nine months go by. I haven’t written a single poem, stanza or word. But my guitar playing is off the chart. Woo-hoo, couldn’t be happier.

Ten, eleven, twelve months have now past, when I pull up in the driveway and see an envelope sticking out of the letterbox. I grab the oversized piece of post and open it distractedly in the front seat of the car.

Oh, shit. It’s the book of essays, but I can’t remember their significance. I’m finally happy being just another second-rate guitarist rocking the suburbs. Man, I’ve given up. Like really given up. What the fuck. I feel like someone has just dragged the needle back across the record of my life, and that the back-masked message I’m now hearing threatens to implode the very reality of my new simple, dumbed-down choice of existence.

“Read that, and then we can start from there,” my would-be mentor had told me almost exactly a year ago.

Start what? I can’t remember what it was I wanted so badly. Let me go back to my Wild Turkey and amplified heat haze. Fuck this, I was happy. I was happy for having quit.

I crack open the cover of the book, searching for answers. But it only gets worse. My mentor has handwritten notes to me in the margins of his own book. His tone is jovial and self-deprecating; his handwriting impeccably informal.

Don’t make me go back to being my old self, I beg the Fates. It’s too hard to contemplate. I’m a fraud. A master alchemist will see right through me. I’ve forgotten how to turn words into a golden phrase. I have fallen out of love with all language and it with me.

But still I hold this invitation in my hands.

agent of change

perched on its crossbar of wood
the crow chokes on a vowel
waiting the same as every day
for a sight it never did see before
biding time till a new day breaks
while all the time growing weary
from nothing different to report
other than the somber croak it cries
mimicking the preacher’s call to repent.

some thoughts on waxing and waning lyrical like the moon

there is no poetry coursing through my veins
when I first stare at the blank page
the grip of inspiration yet to take a hold of me
and that time come when I should feel again
like a wolf ensnared in a steel trap for
instead at first I taste the familiar taste of failure
a tightening in my chest a shortness of breath
what if my mind becomes undone? what if
my words cease to punch above their weight?
such questions vex me like a gypsy curse sworn
under a blood red moon in an evil, hieratic tongue
but even so I will endure all this and worse by far
if, as now, the wordless ecstasies I enjoy by tracing
the concatenations of my unknowable soul with a pen
continue to outshine the agonies of my self-inflicted doubt.

a plea for peace for our time

continental drift creates a
consciousness shift whereby
nations are formed along
imaginary borders
the human species disperses
like an inverse implosion
all four corners scattered
with our common dna
but then out come the sums
of long embittered division
sourced from holy books
and localized religion
indecent wars of terror disturb
the sleep of the innocent
even though deep in the
hearts of the surviving dissidents
there still exists a belief
in the sacred contract
we have inherited as the
evolutionary heirs of
this most peaceful of planets.

A civilized debate about a painful topic

All initiation calls for a sacrifice
the bloodier and more brutal the better
the subincision of the penis or
the knocking out of the two front teeth
if survived, would guarantee one’s acceptance
as an adult worthy of the name. However,
in our modern world all past rituals of initiation
are condemned for we are a civilized people
(of perpetually arrested development left
all too often scarred later in life by an
unshakeable and childish sense of futility) thus
we reject the savagery of tribal ways, although
by doing so we as good as condone that
self-harm our youth inflict upon themselves
in the guise of drug overdose and degrading
sexual encounters, while somewhere
a middle ground exists ignorantly ignored.

gin and limelight

“love it, leave it and
love it some more…”
implores the torch-song
singer singing her song
of old world heartache
this siren of a faded bakelite age
her grip on the microphone
like she’s got a fistful of
her dirty lover’s spine
the band on their break
leave her to the spotlight
she so adores.

separated at rebirth

I’ve been crying out and searching for your ghost all these twenty-five years or more
along dead-end streets with changed names
and the outpouring of sorrow it did
elicit to remind others of your fate
has made me carry a pariah’s shame
every step of the way until now
because only now I feel the burden shared
and I know you’re here with me and that
we are never truly lost to each other
only ever separated at rebirth.

——————————————————

Happy Birthday, Peter.

Black River Falls Calling

a homily come late in the season
to edify the wavering in Spirit
is needed in this backwater town
there is a dust that sticks to the skin
just from walking around in the sun
a relentless sun that refuses to winter
I have heard the bells call wayward souls to muster
but never seen a single sinner saved
baptism in the river denied due to
lack of rain
I walk around some and collect more dust
before finding a sermon written in spider web
under the eaves of the bicycle repair/gun shop
which I’m unable to read for lack of prayer.

guess who?

the door’s hinges
trumpet like a
sorry elephant
while I try to tiptoe
towards the bed
dimly aware how
late the hour is
and confusing
stealth for stumbling
over my excuse
into the doghouse

again.