I arrive from work to find the new copy of some magazine
you’re published in positioned just so I’d see it, not that you wanted
it to sit like a pair of boobs on the coffee table, its just my luck.
You’re at the Bookstore and I haven’t sent out a submission in months.
I smoke a cigarette, my god I’ve mentioned cigarettes, I’m trite,
You’ll find me reading “Letters to a young poet”,
I’ll mention some kind of drug and then sex or something
that some way deals with sex, I’m losing it completely.
I have started to talk to myself, I’m sorry to be so brash,
we can talk about that at some other time. Tonight,
I say to myself your never going to break
those powerful cage doors if you don’t at least bare down,
see it’s totally harmless, it’s less like talking to myself and
more like having Gus D’amato in side my head, totally normal.
Instead of sitting down to write a poem, I smoke a joint
while reading the poems of those poets in those magazine.
When I finish and start to smoke a cigarette again,
which thank god leads to the shit I have wanted to have
for six hours knocking on my backdoor like a police officer
during a riot. I can’t seem to get anything right. I sit on the toilet
and I get to your poems and both are about lovers, but different love,
the difference of the hemispheres, cold and warm water
I always wonder, which lover I am,
if I am either or worst than that, neither and though we are married
and expecting, I know my self-esteem issues are legendary
in psychology circles. Not worthy of poesy or creative
non-fiction, my automatic thoughts tell me, as I read your
masterful working on the toilet. I can’t help wanting to know,
my blood is competitive, I want to be the man that burns
your bushes, makes you feel heavy against the light
of a million bulbs, I can’t even start to explain
the paranoid psychosis I control on the toilet, you know how I get.
There is no toilet paper and I’ve got something on my mind that is
less idea and more anvil. You think you’re the mess?
I can’t tell you why I can’t sing and it’s a shame cause I hear singing,
I hear Otis Redding in the shower and I hear the Train rumbling
in the other room, I hear stories unfold like a geisha,
millions of fragments, poems, and those short bits of cleverness
we pass off as poems. I can’t let it out. Somewhere between I do,
I don’t, and I do again, I lost my voice. It gives me this horrible
pressure in my lower back that shoots into my legs. I always have
heartburn, there is a rash all over my body and I can’t sleep.
I’d like to blame it on the pills, that’s easy, I could write poems
about the pills. I’d like to blame it on this town or this county or
this whole godforsaken state, being a stranger in a strange land
isn’t easy for human or martian. I’d like to blame
the sorry excuse for employment I currently call a paycheck,
I’d like to blame my shrink, the anxiety of becoming a parent,
rising marijuana prices, the paranoia, the pressure I carry.
I can’t tell what is worst at this exact minute, my life, our life,
my dry pen cap, our bank account, my self worth or the lack
of toilet paper with no one to get you more. To be rather honest,
my sincerity in this piece is making me have to shit again
and that is too much to handle on a toilet with no toilet paper,
8:51 pm, Friday, you know how hard it is for me to talk to you
about anything that matters.
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