words of a people aligned in their perfect order
I’ve been stuck and I feel like I am beginning to be unstuck. I wake now feeling that there is something I have to do I just don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to discover what it is.
These are not questions but merely statements or self observations.
I want lightening and thunder.
I’ve gone visibly more gray in the past week.
my coffee cup is 9/10 low on the magic elixir and what is left has grown cold and uninviting.
i realize that someday I may regret my tattoos. who knows how difficult it is going to be to charm and cajole other octogenarians with sagging tattooed flesh. Maybe the secret will be to continue to gain weight once the skin is no longer elastic until the body is ravaged by diabetes and heart disease only to then regret these errors as I die a painful and premature death before I’ve even reached the eighth decade.
” I always thought that life would get easier as I aged, and it doesn’t.” – a cousin of my deceased father in law.
I feel so much better now.
I am not concerned that it’s four thirty and I’ve written nothing here yet, and I am unconcerned that I don’t really have any ideas of what to write here. Trimming my unconcerned fingernails, thinking my unconcerned thoughts and contemplating one particular medication I’m on.
This is the thing about all creative people we will have intense periods of creativity, steady periods of creativity and then nothing. There are days, weeks and sometimes months where we are simply useless. Depression usually kicks in if it hasn’t been what you’ve been feeding off of, personally I hate to write when I am too depressed as everything comes out of self pity then, like writing when you’re drunk too often. My preference is to have the ideas arrive at great pace where I don’t have time to consider if I am depressed or happy, a mess or about to get laid.
Now (when I am mired in creationless oceans) is when I like to study other poets or read things that are not in my normal line. Right now I am studying the life of Georg Trakl, the short life fraught with madness, drug abuse and incest (unproven but think along the lines of the Royal Tennanbaums without the adoption). I find a lot of his translations lacking a poetic quality that is present in the German version and am happy to report that a new translation of his complete body of work is being worked on but in the meantime I may find myself reworking some translations to reflect his poetic style. I don’t speak German well but I do write poetry so I have an up there. I did a similar thing with Lorca’s poetry years ago and never really did anything with it as I will probably not do anything with Trakl if I do re-translate. Translating syntax in the poetic method is difficult no matter who you are and you are almost writing an entirely new work when you do it, but one you cannot rightfully take credit for, just the translating part.
This has been a ramble brought to you by the poet Jhon Baker.
three poems fitting harmoniously together
third rate diner
writing poems on
paper napkins;
inadvertently blowing my nose into
the most recent.
modern medicine
modern medicine is always a marvel
no matter the year
until we need for the end
then it’s simply horrible.
loving
such good loving
such good nurturing,
such good loving,
such good fucking.
– Hoc Scripsi
False start, a half a page into the post and it was junk. False starts are a pretext to a much grander illusion. That is to say that what remains may be more profound or less depending on your attachment to the former beginning which was wholly parsing The Doors in a historical context. I gave up on it when it fell into the realm of personal opinions. A singular belief is unimportant when it comes to the historical context.
Another false start, writing about constraints and then realizing that the author Lily Hoang recently wrote about the same thing in the same manner as was being laid out here. Not being into intellectual property theft and feeling it best to stick with the theme, it was erased in it’s entirety. Another half page gone.
But this is the problem, what do you want to see here? what words do you need to read? a photo that makes you cry or laugh or sigh and go awww – and here is the moment where you project those wishes
on this blank space.
there, your life should now be complete.
the platitudes of willful resemblance 