It’s All Academic

Become a teacher.
Get a mortgage on a house in the suburbs.
Buy a car with good gas mileage.
Get involved in the local poetry readings.
Start a zine and publish only those who publish you.
Use superlatives
like ‘excellent’ or ‘brilliant’ when describing the lousy work of your friends.
(Flattery is your friend too).
Read William Carlos Williams.
Become obsessed with his Red Wheelbarrow theory.
Cultivate a garden in your backyard.
Plant it with lima beans, bell peppers, radishes.
Watch everything die.
Give up on it.
Read more William Carlos Williams.
Be sober.
Get tenure.
Never miss a meal.
Ignore your betters.
Go bald.
Get back to nature.
Begin by mowing your own lawn.
Write some poesy about it (in the Charles Simic style – trade
Williams
in for him).
Become obsessed with chinch bugs and molecrickets
and the growth of grass and various types of weed killers.
Crash into a stump with your lawnmower.
Do a flip over the handlebars.
Get whiplash.
Wear a neckbrace for some months.
A fat and cumbersome one.
One that presses down into your collarbones and pushes up
into your jowls so your jowls
drape themselves over the edges of it
giving you the appearance of a Basset Hound with its flabby
mug sitting on a linoleum floor.
Believe that your students are noting your wit
when they’re really drawing cartoons of you.
Sell your lawn equipment.
Hire cheap Guatemalan labor and pay off your house
and pay off your car
and be even more sober
and buy a Hog
and leathers and a plasma TV.
And come home early from a faculty meeting one day
and witness
the meter reader
or the software salesman
or the bug exterminator
working away
on your wife.
You start shouting
and they start shouting and you ball
up your fists and the veins stand up in your forehead
and your whole bald head turns red and then
a deep shade of monkey-vomit purple comes down over your face
and he climbs off her
apologizes snatches up his clothes and balls
them up and placing them carefully over his nether regions
slinks half-nude along the wall and out the front door
and you go into your study
and you bawl God out
and reach for a glass of water.
Then reach for Simic.
When he fails
reach for Galway
Kinnell and Kinnell failing
lick your wounds
and check your pride
and forgive your wife
Because you can’t really blame her.
You turned her into your mother the day you got married
and besides, a poet needs a little pain in his life.
It gives him something to write about.
But don’t write about that.
Keep writing your surrealism, or whatever you call it.
Follow the herd.

Time To Waste

I see you wanted to waste a little time.
So did I.

You, the reader, must have too much of it
Me, the writer, doubly so.

Think of all the other things
you could be doing now.

Think of all the other things
I could have done instead.

It seems we both make bad choices.
Isn’t it good to know
We have this much in common?

Let’s make another bad choice,
This time together.

You can read this poem to the end.
And me? I’ll write it.

Middleman

Christ knows why
But after hearing 
You’re back with him
I’m remembering 
How you told me
He always tried
To fuck you 
In the arse
And how sometimes,
Unwilling 
You let him

And I ain’t saying
It’s nice to do so
But as I think of him
Hammering away,

I can’t tell if it’s
You 
Or me
Who’s in
More pain.

Bible Camp Agnostic

We talked about sex at Bible camp: 
three young women, not yet
out of high school, bored out
of our wits in downstate Illinois.

The summer torpor drove us
to seek weird companionship
amongst Christian families—
screaming kids dressed in overalls,
pasty-faced pre-adolescents,
women who wore bras under
their nightgowns at bedtime.

In giggling whispers, the girls
and I discussed baseball terms.
One had already made it
to home plate, at age thirteen.
The other, more bashful,
had reached second base.

I estimated my own progress
as slightly past third.

Midafternoon, dutiful,
we sang songs about Jesus.
The pastor threw his head back,
crooning about Jesus’ arms, how much
he wanted those arms around him. 

I didn’t believe in Jesus,
so my mind always wandered.
I thought of my boyfriend,
and the hardness of his bat.

By the end of the weekend, 
I was best friends with the girls. 
The three of us exchanged
phone numbers before we parted.

We hugged each other, tearful, 
promising to keep in touch,
but, as I should have predicted,
Jesus had other plans.

The first girl had sex with a cop
while she was still underage.

I’m sure my other friend
eventually made it past second,

but something tells me
it was less than what she expected.

At this point, I’m just glad
to swing somebody’s bat,
and I hope somewhere in heaven,
Jesus is swinging his as well.

Siemann

I walk into the interview
with a fake confidence I have 
not had in years.

Even the lighting seems half-favourable.

An older gentleman stands up
so we can shake hands.

Good to meet you!
I’m Richard Siemann,
head of merchandise.

I stop and pause for a moment.

So, you’re Dick Siemann?
The words just come out.

His face grows red
and he collects his papers,
says that concludes our 
interview.

Acting as though 
this has never happened
before.

Sound Like

Simple and to the point. 
Did anyone hear a woman screaming,
Like she was being killed or murdered? Around noon today? 
I heard it from my backyard but could not pinpoint the direction.
I drove around the subdivision for about 5 minutes. The screams stopped. 

The responses:

I only heard the fucking leaf-blowers.
Probably got their cable bill.
Might have been a fox. They sound like a woman screaming. 
Might have been a bobcat They sound like a woman screeching.
Maybe an owl? But not likely during the daytime.
Probably the brats at 1409 Stonebrook. They never shut up.
Maybe a Jehovah’s Witnesses at the wrong house,
Maybe a coyote, a T-Rex, or Bigfoot? It’s mating season.

Did you call the police? Did you call 911?

Someone did. 
Too late.

Sometimes what sounds like a woman screaming
Is a woman screaming.

Birthday Cake Doesn’t Taste the Same

Eye of the storm
I’m in a fake friend-neighbor’s 
third floor bathroom; coke mirror haunts
my devastation and
resistance

Left the faucet running with
Pulp Fiction on pause
but the movie is still playing in my head
Something’s pulling me under-
This party’s fucking over; dumb bitch
overboard, where the sharks serve me
cake and truth-or dare me to bleed

Full moon in Scorpio
and this frog princess has been stung 
a few hundred times or so, pondering
too long at Crystal Lake; killer crossroads,
stagnant bath water-over thinking,
over drinking the death parade-kool-aid,
slow motion blinking-
I’ve been merely existing
inside an esoteric yawn

god in the white lines; god
in the mirror- eyes
on the prize yo,
Are you listening? Grow up,
just a mini ego death on a Saturday night-
The bitch is back and all that jazz
I forgot how to have fun or maybe,
I never knew at all
The sharks giggle, 
it’s Tuesday

I don’t respond but I’ll be gone
by the time they breakdown

the doors.

A Plunge into the River

can’t escape the blank slate
that chalk can’t ride
letters, much less words,
fall
hit their cursive heads
flatten like an education
without liberal arts
or song
or the articulation of questions

words fly by in the mind
river-moon-sky-fire
a rote of words
sheep or baseball batting averages
or the earworm of an Annie Lennox tune

I say river to myself
leap in, am carried away by the current
the froth
the rapid bounce and dash
flash of a cry for help
but
thrown out
nothing to say
like Heraclitus
just an average Greek
clinging to Athena’s ankles
asking to be saved
from Sparta, Xerxes, Thermopylae
the river of arrows in a narrow
pass
a history test of fact, fiction
and don’t ask
for Socratic logic
in a poem flowing
through the sound and texture of words
bird songs greet the sun
poets run, leap into language
cannonball
what a splash!
and some poems drown
because they are about nothing
really
really?
the quibblers come with arrows, axes
critical seminar notes
boats don’t float
that violate the academics
the middle-aged ladies
throwing fruits, vegetables
haughty little *******
and that word I’d write
except I’m not into hip hop
so let us wrap the rap
and look on the river flowing past
looks like the water fallen
from Niagara
the chop and plop
in the narrow canyon
sluicing to the St. Lawrence

I am on the bank
left bank
being liberal
and wannabe French
I watch nonsense
say Dada
but he is dead
that makes me sad