Trying for some kind of balance, here...
...between amnesty and indulgence
I started up this version of my blog (which has had quite a few lives at this point, most of them ended by my drowning in the blinky lights of the thing, if you know what I mean - thank you, SubStack, for saving me from that distraction at least) to get myself using words again. Somewhere along the line, I convinced myself that my writing would be no use, since [insert any excuse ever used as a reason to stop creating]. This is stupid, however; it is as self-sabotaging as the “I ate a chocolate so I may as well quit trying to eat healthy” or “I missed a workout so I give up on moving at all" bullcrap I’ve allowed Jerry (the crappiest of my inner critics) to convince me was true.
I have had an interesting last few days. Not interesting-bad, and maybe even interesting-good, but it will require a bit more chewing for the full flavor to make itself known. In the mean time, I will not, as I planned to do, force myself to make up the four days of poems I missed for National Poetry Month. Instead, here is a single poem that, after an evening of searching1, I found on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/. It is written by one of the authors on my TBR, Dennis Cooper.
After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade
Their jeans sparkled, cut off
way above the knee, and my
friends and I would watch them
from my porch, books of poems
lost in our laps, eyes wide as
tropical fish behind our glasses.
Their football flashed from hand
to hand, tennis shoes gripped
the asphalt, sweat's spotlight on
their strong backs. We would
dream of hugging them, and crouch
later in weird rooms, and come.
Once their ball fell our way
so two of them came over, hands
on their hips, asking us to
throw it to them, which Arthur did,
badly, and they chased it back.
One turned to yell, “Thanks”
and we dreamed of his long
teeth in our necks. We
wanted them to wander over,
place deep wet underarms to
our lips, and then their white
asses, then those loud mouths.
One day one guy was very tired,
didn't move fast enough,
so a car hit him and he sprawled
fifty feet away, sexy, but he was
dead, blood like lipstick, then
those great boys stood together
on the sidewalk and we joined them,
mixing in like one big friendship
to the cops, who asked if we were,
and those boys were too sad to counter.
We'd known his name, Tim, and how
he'd turned to thank us nicely
but now he was under a sheet
anonymous as God, the big boys crying,
spitting words, and we stunned
like intellectuals get, our high
voices soft as the tinkling of a
chandelier on a ceiling too high to see.
I cannot recommend enough spending an evening by first thinking of a specific emotion or subject matter that you wish to illustrate via a poem, and then diving into a site like poetryfoundation.org in search of just the right one. There will never be just the right verse for what you are thinking, but many will come close, and they will gather ‘round and cheer you on in your search. They will argue, when you are too tired to keep looking, over which should stand as avatar of your feelings, and the ones left unpicked will not hold a grudge, but will comfort you as you drift off to sleep. All in all, a night well-spent.