Distant Sures

I hope you are all enjoying my rather pixelated banner

and new font. This old blog needed a bit of

sprucing up, I thought. So I went mild and

did that. I made that horrid banner myself

and it took simply too long

to get the size right, but alas, it works,

right?

But alright, here we go for real.

I haven't written anything in a long time.

Too long of a time.

It's eating away at the edges of me,

like acid and steel wool.

And other abrasive, corrosive things.

Poetry gets like that when it

shows it teeth,

like the true beastly thing it is.

People do not understand that.

At all, I think.

There are like, 3 types of poetry audiences.

I hate one of them, immensely.

And my own mother is turning into one of those types.

The type that talks about poetry,

never really reads it.

Acts like it's just a thing.

And when these types read it,

they read the flowery

cheesy, bad types of poetry.

Or they try too hard

and miss the point.

Or obscure it

and mutilate it until

the poetry is no longer beautiful.

These people don't get to the gritty

real, raw, and absolutely gorgeous, stunning

side of what poetry can be.

The poetry that is so

riveting you can hardly breathe,

The words that align themselves

so perfectly.

The simplistic phrasing that

gets across a complex or simple subject

perfectly.

That's my favorite.

Because while I enjoy

beautifully eloquent, sophisticated phrasing,

nothing beats simplicity.

And when you can accomplish

that in poetry,

you're doing your job right.

I don't think I'm there.

I'm still trying to hide behind that

language itself.

But seriously.

People need to pick up

some intense poetry,

and read it for what it is.

Actually read it at all.

There's nothing worse than someone

who talks like they know what's going on

when they don't.

And I'm not saying I am some poetry queen

over here, but good god,

I at least read the stuff.

I miss poetry.

It's barely gone away

and already I miss it.

Sometimes I am just too

sleepy or sad to write anything.

Even when what I want to write

is practically lying in front of me.

Like how lights look

when you take off your glasses

as you ride in the

car in the dark down

a highway away from a city.

Or how the suburbs look different

from over there.

How they begin to blend in.

Or how the city

feels when you're in it,

when it's just sort of there,

as you're driving by,

how everything looks different

even though it's quite the same.

Or how you can't be a

communist because this is America

and communism doesn't work anyway,

so you want to be a socialist

but are afraid you'll get

beat up or kicked

out of your house because

your dad is in love with Ronald Reagan.

Believe me,

I need to write.

It's how I function,

and I suppose my functioning

just isn't quite right

since it's been a fruitless few days.

I have books to read,

so many amazing books.

And no time in which to do so.

I don't want to sleep,

I want to read

and write something

that someone like enjoy,

someone might pick up

and say

"I get this. I can totally dig this."

I want to learn how to be experimental in poetry,

but learning how would kill the point.

I want to learn how to follow contemporary poetry,

and to understand post-modernism so I don't sound

like an under-educated dweeb who writes

bad poetry.

I never want to become one of those people

who is bad, and doesn't know.

Someone who suffers for art because it's cool.

Someone who writes poorly on purpose

and calls it art.

I don't know how to be a pure artist,

a pure poet.

I don't know,

because I'm not there yet.

And I am yearning

for whatever's coming next,

because it has to be better than

where I am,

at least in the field of poetry.

And At least in what counts

in my life.

------------------

Anyways.

Goodnight.

Please don't be one of those poetry-non-reading-smart-aleck-people.

And of course,

I love you.