April 27, 2010

suppose to be colder today, if you believe in such things.

by jhon baker
as the weather man/woman’s predictions – but they are false idols.

Barely awake, managing to sleep in later today (till 7:30am), while not regretting it, thinking I should be a lot more awake by now.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon shifting a pile of logs into a more orderly pile of logs, and looking at the plethora of felled oak left to split. What I need is a small group of strapping young men to effort my garden woes away for the year. I’ll mow and seed, whatever from the comfort and fun of my smallish tractor, but all that remains needs another bloke to care about it and money more than I do.
Tchaikovsky will sober you in the morning.
Just when I expect there to be fresh coffee, inevitably, it is old or empty.
This time it was brewing.
I’ve trained my ear to hear the beep of the coffee maker above all other static. beep beep – ready and I must move as ‘Rosie the Robot’ doesn’t work here – beep beep beep and I have to make more if I want to keep this caffeine high going until I fall to sleep.
I am still trying to train my ear to simply wipe out all the static to hear only the tintinnabulating in my ears from the years of playing in rock bands. If I can manage it then I will be able to write anywhere, as it is I need the quietness of my home or a quietness much like it. Coffee shops are right out but having run two of them I can tell you that no-one likes a guy on a laptop in a coffee shop. A typewriter now, that is tolerated slightly better but only if you are carrying a loaded weapon. Ive never tried the typewriter in a cafe thing as I live in Illinois and it may be illegal here to even admit you have a firearm.
I am babbling and listening to Tchaikovsky, waiting for the double beep of the coffee maker.
no-one minds the guy with a notebook neatly scribbling away anymore though. Interesting. Once the iPad is in the hands of every one then laptops will be okay I think. Or it might be now with the proliferation of texting, sexting and general bathroom graffiti.

but none of this is important. none of this gets me a cup of coffee any faster than my good leg will propel my body to get what it is that is desired.

I am tired of writing letters to people who never write back. I owe a letter to one guy who writes back but lives so close I think I ought to simply invite him over.
Maybe next time I send a letter I will include a sase and paper.

Letter #2104 (one I don’t want)

got your letter.

it reads like a broken heart
(miss our after moments

be mine again)
love letter.

it isn’t is it?
or what is it.

I wonder what it is you really miss.
is it me, or the attention I gave you.
is it our conversations or that you got to
feel important for the afternoon.
is it our supposed friendship or, now, 
you are bored.

I am not your midnight man.
I am not your backdoor lover.
only that which I have
always been for you,
a stranger on a distant
beach looking the other way;
or turned around
or something else entirely.

what’s the least awkward thing to
say here.

what is it?
                   you woke up this morning
and want me to care.

you see…
it fucks up my whole day.

 – Hoc Scripsi

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April 26, 2010

it seems to be Monday morning, and glad of it.

by jhon baker

When I worked, Mondays were always the easiest day, Full of paperwork and sitting at the desk to get everything in the mail on time, I would start early, around five AM usually and be gone between 1-2pm. Of course this necessitated waking up at 4am but this whole thing has been a digression.
or is it? as I am mostly unsure about the direction I want to be in this morning and thinking a little of this afternoon but mostly of sleep and dreaming, specifically last nights. I don’t mean to live in the past a little but you have to admit, it is right there for us to do so.
I wonder if I will ever stop wanting to drink, smoke, take drugs.
I wonder if I will ever want to stop drinking coffee, writing, masturbating, playing with legos, loving legal voyeurism, among various other bad or dangerous things.
I don’t wonder these things too much because if I allow myself to live in the future I can see that the day will pass when these are not options but memories that I will continue to scribble about.
I look forward to being a dirty old man.
I look backward at being a dirty young man.
Right now is the middle. between two dirty states of being.
my thoughts are often unwilled intrusions, and I don’t act on most of them.
which is good because when I obsess, I obsess with the best of them.
I have a feeling that I will be adding to this later as I don’t feel finished yet. But am for now.

crap

1.
how much that each
one of us writes
is the summation or
fruition of
last nights dinner
today?

2.
in Irish pubs
you are surrounded by
la  la and hi ho’s

in the American bar
only by tears and
lives regretted or
lost.

I prefer neither nor
drinking – pills and
pain are my fixations.

 – Hoc Scripsi

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April 25, 2010

Where I write

by jhon baker

I was asked recently, Via facebook, where I write. meaning if there was a place as part of a ritual with my writing. As where it isn’t ritualized and I write anywhere, diners, the car, on my bed, in the yard – where ever, you see the inspira moves around a bit. But the majority of it is done in a little room, painted red at the back of my house in a secluded part of Elgin.

a painting of mine – the sides and top are cut off so it’s like watching a letterbox movie in pan and scan – I face this when I write or it is in front of me but I face the page.

My IBM Selectric III in it’s newest position with a stack of poetry and prose under a brass monkey reading a book. My return address on a stamp.

within reach. Normally there is a coffee cup there but I wasn’t writing at the time, a stack of nice paper that my wife keeps me in, a page a day, a XDm 9mm – loaded, an old hunting knife, the Bose remote, meditation beads under the page a day tear outs, a frog reading a book, white out and Maitreya Buddha holding my mechanical pencil. and scratch paper.

any questions?

sometimes it’s a colt .45 or a .38 special but all the rest is a constant.

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April 24, 2010

not about xxx porn on the internet

by jhon baker

Happy birthday Willem de Kooning. Love your stuff. 

no matter how long I live, life will be painfully short.
at times it has been painfully long.
even if I live to be  centurian, then dying of
old age,
how is life regarded and why is death not our inevitable friend.

– Hoc Scripsi

the fine art of the mea culpa

as I try to right my life
and hone my influences
there seems less to write about.
plenty of the ol’ inspira
but none of the drama.
none of the cascading
disappointments or pie unreachable.
no more life without happiness.

hard to admit,
that so much poetry can
only be written by the
chronically dissatisfied.

harder to admit
that this is preferential
to the former,
or that the former is
not missed.

and I am waiting for
my shoelace to break.

 – Hoc Scripsi

I wrote the above poem not from personal view as at the time I was slipping into a deep depression where I would subsist for several years but from the one where the writer can only write about being sad and never from the perspective of any other emotion. Like death would always bring about the birth of bards. bullshit.
On writing – the clearer my mind gets the better the writing gets, the easier it is to do. It may be that I write only because I have mental instability, diagnosed mental illness, that I am able to write but but but, I take medication to curb these effects so I am not affected – only inflicted.
Basically what I am saying is that most other writers are full of shit.
maybe I am too.

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