On rhyme and meter

and whether or not I have any.

Writing has taken up a place in my chest again lately, like the warmth spreading inside  you get from drinking whiskey.  It’s been a while, I gotta tell ya.  I have new heroes like Mike, and I’ve gotten in touch with an old hero, Larry.   I’ve been scribbling in my moleskine like mad, and I had a lot of fun with the following, even if it isn’t very good.  It’s raw, but bear with me while I give you a poem.

“I suppose I should worry…”

I suppose I should worry about becoming a barfly,

Sitting on stools, alone,

Drinking with fools, with stone

  hearted men, and girls, not

  ladies in tight things

      tied with strings, 

teasing and drinking while I just sit and watch.

  While the predators hunt

  wolves in a pack of just one,

  hoping to add another notch

  and be done,

  to the headboard,

  the nightstand,

  to any eternal measuring stick that isn’t my hand.

 

I suppose I should worry about going

blind. 

Making Love to myself, alone 

in the dark, in this “home”

  to a cold electric glow

  or an oily slick page

    at my age

I should find someone, spend meaningful time.

  Everyone else pairs off

  and touches and feels

  and they don’t seem to mind 

  that they’re real.

  and emotion,

  not aesthetic

  should rule a life that’s not quite so

pathetic.

I suppose I should worry that I only feel numb

  that sometimes, inside me

  I only want not to hurt anymore

  that I sometimes only want to be looked at and not talked to.

I should worry that I’ve become a great actor,

a reactionary thespian,

going through the motions

     and emotions

that I’m supposed to be having.

That I fall somewhere

close to “an artist”,

“a person”,

something “real”, like a great big yellow plastic poser fuckin’ lawn dart flung by somebody else.

and that I don’t know what I’m waiting for, what’s real, or who the hell I am.

I suppose I should worry that I gave up that nice little rhyme and meter thing that I had going for a while back there.

But that’s just somebody else’s trick, not my smoke and mirrors.

I don’t need to believe in magic, or romance,

or anybody else’s fuckin’ bullshit big ideas or spiritual enlightenment or corproate sponsored nuclear family.  They can glow in the dark like a fuckin’ suburban Chernobyl for all I give a shit.

I “suppose” that if I want to be an Uber-dork introvert and a drunk and scribble in my little black pocket notebook while drinking whiskey instead of publishing my novel or changing someone’s mind, that if I only care to worry if the chicks all around me in this smoke filled den of liqour and sex think I’m cool looking instead of whether or not they can fuckin’ spell much less carry on a conversation or be my muse, then that’s my fuckin’ business, isn’t it? 

And if I want to worry about whether or not the cases upon cases of skin mags and painted faces in the boxes in my closet are properly stored and aplhabatized according to porn-star-slut-of-the-moment, or fetish kink, or the stickiness of the pages because I just couldn’t hold my wad long enough to reach for the kleenex box and it didn’t really matter ’cause it was empty, again, then “I suppose”  my only real “worry” should be why didn’t I buy enough kleenex.

And “I suppose” that if I want to live for only the small, the visceral, the single moments of solitary pleasure in a world of pain, if all I want is to numb myself with liqour and new clothes, orgasms and new tattoos, if I want to abandon the endeavor for the emotionless love of a bad little girl with pixie chopped hair, starring at me through a haze of her own cigarette smoke with a look in her eyes like she can’t decide whether or not she wants to fuck my brains out or stab me with the knife in her boot for staring at her TITS, THEN JUST THAT LOOK OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH FOR ME? RIGHT!?!?

Right?

PLEASE?

No?

Then I suppose

    I should worry.