Posts tagged ‘on the blog’

June 15, 2019

This is some Bullshit

by jhon baker

As I was going over this blog – the writing it contains – I saw that it is pretty fucked up.
Not what I had written – what wordpress has done to it.
The older work – posted a few editor programs ago – no longer contains the proper line breaks, stanza breaks, sometimes posting the HTML at the start of everything and sometimes not.
I’ve been trying to correct this and have found it is not possible without retyping everything.
Even copy pasting the entries does not seem to work on those posts.
I may have to screen shot all my work from here on or I don’t fucking know.

stay tuned

July 3, 2013

When the coffee maker starts on fire

by jhon baker

I don’t post much but there isn’t really all that much I want to say. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately but the concentration has been one pointed and into a realm that I don’t want to harp away at on my blog – see the previous post – but I need a new roof as this one has failed me (still thankful to have one), a new washer because the old one had failed me (so did the new one which I am receiving a replacement for today), the basement flooded and we are drying it out ever so slowly before relaying the carpet, and the coffee maker lit itself on fire of which we are using a back-up until we get around to replacing the old one.

It is important to always have a back-up coffee maker that gets occasional use to keep it working properly.

I haven’t been putting much out for publication either, though I spent the first few months of this year writing and a lot got written. I am wondering how it all turned out mostly. I am never a good judge of my own poetry – I either think it is all crap or all beyond compare – depending on my mental state and state of medications. At the moment I cannot recall the last submission which is still waiting in the wind for acceptance or denial and it is bad form to have simultaneous submissions which I have done and there is a handful of poems with multiple publishing credits. I’ve been hoping no one noticed and I don’t think anyone has. So, I wait for this last batch to be rejected or accepted before I start to send out more.

some poems

 

some poems take years to write

some only minutes

every other poem is in-between

and none so far has taken more.

 

like Bukowski, Williams, O’Hara

I am a writer of poems

short poems

long poems

most a few in-between

like all creatives I am

notoriously unreliable in action

chasing down the inspirations

with a stick in one hand

a pen in the other

months of missing my prey

and weeks of eating well

and growing fat

 

but I write on this IBM Selectric III

and drink coffee like it was religion

no longer getting drunk or drugging

my days away

and slipping into the nightgown of poetry.

now they all come fully dressed

with ten fingers typing

furiously in fits and starts

mostly done during the day.

 

I am nostalgia interrupted

a willful resemblance of another time

before my iMac and laptop dominated

my final drafts and submissions

email rejections or acceptances

 

I haven’t stamped an SASE in years

or walked to the mailbox hopeful or dreadful

waiting to throw away another poem

such as this.

 

– Hoc Scripsi

 

My beard is long and the shampoo that we are using makes it wiry. it is too wet to ride my motorcycle today. I am waiting for the new washer and I hate to wait. Not that I am impatient, but that I am interested in doing other things while my son is at camp and I can do other things. Tomorrow is the annual holiday of our independence (in the USA) and I don’t do much to celebrate it – even when invited to a party there are other things I’d rather be doing. I’d rather be writing even though I’ve no ideas and, for the moment, the inspira has found other avenues for its own expressions.

December 26, 2012

post holiday lego building

by jhon baker

Listening to The Black Keys and sitting with my son while he builds his Lego Teenage Mutant Turtle sets, earlier I built one of my own Lego sets. Big Ben. As an adult there is still the ever burning love for Lego.

The main concern after holidays is where to put all the new stuff – in my case it isn’t hard as I got clothes I needed, a few seasons of my favorite television show and a lot of books – but for the boy, more toys means a need to clear out space and think about donating things he has aged out of.

There is really nothing I have to say here. I am mostly out of the depression that lasted beyond my ability to handle – four months of complete darkness preceded by decent creative impulses and followed by a stiff climb out and a slight return to forms of creativity. I have started several poems and am thinking my way though the basic outline of a novel/memoir with embellishments and the ability to deny anything – This story is based on realish events and the people have altered names and are realish representations of the folks that they are modeled after – liberties will be taken where I do not want to relive certain things and where the truth is too strange to be believed. Nothing will be cranked up beyond reality because reality itself is often itself unbelievable. If I write it as fiction I can always deny that the hero of the tome is myself and as I’ve often said of poetry…

– never confuse the narrator of the poem with its author –

sound advice.

I think John Berryman said it first or best – I know it wasn’t my brain to come up with it and once I had heard the valuable teaching I was free then to really create. Some constraints are good and some work against you like good friends who never want us to become successful.

I was going to put a poem here but I think I’ll post twice instead.  – Jhon

May 7, 2012

sun and the moon continued

by jhon baker

I should give up the blog altogether. I’ve been going through a period of low creativity lately and blogging about it has not been on my to do list.

But, I’ve been thinking. Reading. Refilling the well with new information. I am waiting now for the payoff and waiting isn’t my strong suit.

What I need to do is get down to it and write a bunch of crap which I’ve been resisting. Allow the brain to work its connective magic, there is no other way that each synapse is going to know that it isn’t doing its job. The pretty genius in the corner needs to get out of the corner and meet me half way. There is nothing else really going on that is that distracting except what I distract myself with.

Not that I haven’t been writing and occasionally putting out something worth sharing and so I blame that end of the year burst and depression that followed. To which I am heavily medicated against now but also medicated against the severity of another mania which I miss and see flickers of here and there fighting for attention.

Giving up the blog would be an act of honesty as I now am feeling the dishonesty of keeping up the appearance of having one. Would all three of my readers miss my occasional outreach? Would you notice? Are there more than three of you?

I am reaching for the bottle here and wishing for the stars… the sun and the moon, the shaky days of not knowing if I had a clean uniform for work and if I was going to be fired for my latest outright challenge to the authority of a nameless supervisor. I had never wanted to work but now it is all I want to do. Being disabled/retired at 35 is not all it may seem to be but there is the small check from government and endless guns to play with when no-one is looking.

here is something newish which I was going to send to Take it to the streets but missed the deadline. It is for my wife – the muse that keeps me alive and reaching for the stars.

 

with cold hands

 

it’s cold

so I touch the warmth of her thighs

with cold hands, she shivers

 

gaily we dance under soft comforters

beneath the sounds of jazz belonging to another decade

before our birth

 

the windows closed locking out the colder winds

we warm and embrace, sweat heat in loving

the minutiae of such good fucking

 

– Hoc Scripsi

October 23, 2011

Midnight and I write from my new phone

by jhon baker

I’ve done a number of things with my new phone
Except write a poem or make/take a phone call.

It’s only a matter of time…

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