life flashing before your eyes;

Bad hair and fashion.

I zip around fires set,

fly through explosions blown

and bounce up, whole, after being flattened by trains while tied up on the tracks;

Wile E isn’t so much these days

you might say I’m a road runner, honey,

but I’m just a cartoon.

I pay my money

and wander through with you;

So many mirrors,

there are dozens of you;

I bump into you,

and you smile at me,

but something is

off – the curve of your mouth is wrong;

no, there’s more.

It’s the eyes.

You look through me,

and the smile doesn’t reach your eyes, even though you try your best to make it so.

I look for the exit, and run; but there is none

only a path that goes in a circle

that leads back to you, or the one in the mirror who pretends to be you.

No clowns with bloody teeth

hysterically laughing

could be any scarier.

How do you fall out of love?

If physics applies, you can’t fall out of love.

If you fall in love,

you would have to crawl up and out of it

to get out of it.

That sounds more like it.

And if you’re in it alone,

and you know it, finally,

you would have to

crawl up and out, through mud

and broken glass

and blood

and shit

and realize that the scars

and the stains

all belong to you

tattoos of choice

for always.

Just be glad once you reach daylight,

because a fall from that height kills.

I’m watching a documentary on Hunter S. Thompson tonight: “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.” Hunter  S. Thompson lived a poetic life, and wrote poetically, even though he wasn’t known for writing poetry.  Just watching the movie makes me want to stop writing, because I know that I will never measure up to his classic work, but I still do. I write because I have to, even as I know that there are others out there who are better, those writers I read, and shrink into myself as I read them, because they are Mozart and I am Salieri. Yet, I still write – because I have to, because this is the only thing in life that I do that really means anything to me, and that doesn’t let me down.

I started writing poetry when I was 14; my brother, who was a painter (he was a writer as well, having the first and only poem he ever submitted anywhere be published, but painting was his first passion), wrote me a note once comparing a poem I had written to Lawrence Ferlinghetti; I still have that note. My poets were (still are) Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Alan Ginsberg; then later, in college, Wordsworth, Keats, and Yeats.  I remember reading “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” by Wordsworth for a class, and as I read the poem several times, it began to reveal itself to me, like a secret message, and I felt like I was one of the chosen who were lucky enough to receive that message.  To discover that treasure, and to realize that this was how poetry should always be read, has informed my life from then up to this moment.

Poetry is an adventure; each time you read a poem, it can take you in a different direction. Reading poetry can surprise you; let it do what it will. I have no idea if the poetry I’m writing is “good,” but I know this – it’s good to me, and it’s good for me, and that is enough. Art? As my brother used to say, “Art who?”

is wishing

that I could be Jessica Lange

in the last scene of “Frances“

who meets up with Sam Shepard

and doesn’t know him.

A lobotomy?

Relief, compared to the rest of it.

Stay away – anger has wrapped itself around me

Black and tarry, it blocks my heart

and darkens my blood.

I am gathering strength, and

striking without warning.

So before you decide to look for me,

Here is your warning.

Stay away.