i lived five years
without screens
never bought
anything online
or watched
tv
or had
email
at home
never got a phd
but five years
without screens
that was my
doctorate
and what did i do?
oh, you can guess
i read and read
and wrote
instead
Tag: Poet
He Pretends To Be A Poet
He pretends to be a poet, but does he even like poetry?
Sawgrass shallows, dark forests and trellises, the
language of description, erudition, evoked through so
much longing to be heard, to be read. But what does
it mean? Instead, he writes about what he knows,
which most nights seems like not a lot, sometimes silence
or that most mundane of all arts, parenting, being a dad,
or he reads half pages of zen books while munching on
frozen blueberries, while trying to remember the pickup time
for ballet. No, he doesn’t live in Paris or London, or
New York, although San Francisco is a writerly city, that frigid
foggy place where he was once young, and a real poet
in his studio apartment with Chinese takeout night after night,
the J Church train rumbling, urban soundtrack mixed with
Sonny Rollins, oh yes, he was cool, back in the day, but now
he sits in the kitchen, barefoot, wondering where his socks are.
4 Words In A Line
hard not to smile
when thinking that this
is one of my
favorite things in life
to put four words
on line after line
free to do this
when dishes are done
and the kids are
in bed, and no
one is speaking, not
even the incessant TV
can reach me now
for here it is
just one word, then
the next, neatly placed
like scrabble or a
crossword puzzle, or some
other kind of activity
where concentration is everything
anyway, this is mine
this little moment here
inside my brain’s imagination
where anything is possible
Pretentious Poet with an MFA
Oh yes, I am pretentious with my MFA and
experimental
verse.
I love to string esoteric
words together, as they anguish abstractly with
misunderstood longing mixed in moonlight.
This, this, and this, you see what I mean?
Of course you do, because you’re reading my
perfect poetry, does it not remind you of an
eigenvector, my precocious linear transformation
word that you pretend to know, but don’t,
because you are not me, you see, that is the
whole point of so much of this, divide, separate
me from you and all the rest, who shall and should
remain unpublished.