Fact # 1: But really, in highschool I used to carry around this collection of poems, and if I could turn the subject in that direction, I’d show them off, and most people really enjoyed them, or seemed to, or were incredibly polite, or had no taste. But all I ever really wanted to do was to talk shop about them. Get to how deep I was, how skilled.
I wanted to get down to technical details about the choices I made, like AP English levels of analysis. Specific shit, like why I used a period instead of a comma, and I wanted to talk about this because when I was making that choice, I had a reason, had a reason like someone some time was going to drill me about it.
I look at a poem, now, and I can tell if I’m going to read it or not simply from the way the author uses the space, and, really, that’s a terrible way to decide to read something because most poets don’t have an eye for what stirs me because I’m a bit of an odd-duck, but it’s what I do.
Have you ever done carpentry?
I’m waiting. Speak clearly into your monitor, and be sure to enunciate. More, enunciate more please.
Really hit that ending “O”.
No, that’s an “S”. You haven’t, you haven’t because I said you haven’t.
Not that, not that you’re ever going to read this anyway.
And I’ve been writing this in three different programs just to get the look of it write,
started off this stupid update, just write those in Tumblr,
little farty one offs just so you don’t mind that I didn’t do much today,
but I did: I bought a bookcase, tried Crown Royal Whiskey, smoked a cigar, worked for eight hours,
but I don’t like sharing those things because that, that isn’t why you’re here.
I don’t know why you’re here, but it isn’t for bookshelves.
I’m not Ikea.
In carpentry, good carpentry, the artistry is in using a great deal of hand tools. Factory made items can be beautiful, but anything that hasn’t had the artists hands on every element isn’t art, there’s nothing human in it. And maybe you like your post-humanistic contemporary robot art, but, much as I love computers, there’s nothing behind a computer but the same fundamental physics behind lightning. It’s electrons finding the fastest route, nothing more. But art is stickier because humans don’t always do the best thing or the easiest or even the most possible. Good carpentry is a table that only sits right because that one longer leg is just a little offset. It’s not some cheap fix, so much as it was someone looking at it and deciding that moving the leg was a better choice than making the table out of mostly one log, and one leg out of another.
Carpentry, any art, is about choices.
I fall so deeply in love with these people, and I always wonder if it’s a mistake.
But they kiss so beautifully, and I forget everything, and in that moment there is nothing but them and me and them and our choices in some dance that no one will remember and no one will talk about. Not the way I’ll talk about it, not the way I’ll think about it.
And I look back at those poems,
and my god are they shit,
but they still loved them,
some still love them.
I look at words and I see them not as ideas themselves, but ways to represent them,
And you say, you say that you meant it when you said you loved me,
and that’s beautiful and all, darling, but we were kids then, and it’s been years and years
and years,
years.
My god, you’re beautiful, and hopeful and fun and everything, everything I’ve missed,
and I just want to hold you and feel you breath in my arms and run away and build houses and have children,
and I want it so god-damn easy.
It would be easy.
So easy to love you again.
You’re such a better person to know, and I don’t know if I’m better, but I’m different.
And I’m not part of any communities, but it seems like all the poets are complaining that there isn’t enough feedback anymore, and that everything has become dormant, deciding they’re leaving for more lively pastures, and I’ve said such too, in different ways, but I’ve got this site to sing the notes I use, and I’d rather compose than learn, so maybe it’s easier to stay, to hope the readers will come, rather than go to them.
But I would always rather do my thing and let those who see, see. I feel proud about what I do, but not proud enough to demand your attention. I feel, sometimes, that I should, but I remember that time I took adderall and after my paper was done I talked to my flipflops for an hour sloppily confessing past shoe related sins, I remember getting drunk and writing poetry backwards on windows so people could read it from outside, spewing something about how the weather behind the glass would change the meaning.
Flux. I adore flux, not static beauty, but dynamics. I love physics, dynamic lighting in games. Fuck the rest of the graphics, I want shadows that change because of me, I want to see things slide down the stairs.
I have this delusion that I’m funny. I have this delusion that I’m a damned good poet. I honestly believe they’re true, but that’s kind of the definition of delusion. And that there is an example of an emotion I think most creators my age get. We live in a world with an overabundance of information, of art, and we zero in, as we’ve always thought, on what is better than what.
I don’t know of any other poets who do what I do, where I do, about what I do, why I do, which is why I write rather than read something that someone else wrote.
I write, not because I want to be like anyone else, but because I have something that I want to share with someone, anyone, desperately, and sometimes it’s stupid, and sometimes it’s not.
It would be so easy to love you, and I don’t know if I’m going to or not, it would be so easy.
It’s also easy to believe this will never go anywhere, that everyone is leaving, that everyone is lying.
it’s easy to put out obstacles to make being homeless harder, easier than trying to help the homeless stop being homeless, but those obstacles may also well keep the homeless homeless.
In carpentry, you feel the wood beneath your fingers as you gently bend and shape and change it into something, anything but what it was.
I say some things simply because I like the way my mouth wraps around the syllables.
It would be easy to love you, again.
But it would also be easy to convince myself that I did.
I look at a poem, and I can tell within ten seconds if I’m going to read it or not. I read like an editor in a slush pile, but in my constant silence, what do they get from my distinguished attention?
I want to be great, I want to be taught in classrooms, I want to sell out shows and share my stories, to make people feel.
I want to talk about why I put periods there and commas there.
I want to hold you very close to me and forget that these last five years were apart.
Poets, sometimes, are very broken and confused things, and other times they’re just people desperate to say something.
Fact # 2: Robot poets ate your pills.
