June 30, 2005
Tired? Lonely? Overweight?
Become a natural product, like a river, and fall downhill.
June 29th, 2005 Wednesday
It just felt good to be breaking the law. Drinking my first beer of the evening in the cab of the truck. Locked up the breaks approaching the stop light because AC/DC was playing TNT on 107-7 The Bone.
Killing a child in the crosswalk wouldn't feel anywhere's as good as this.
Tuesday June 28th, 2005
I feed words into the machine. Type till the tears fall from my sockets. My Robot puffs smoke from burning fuel. We call that a cigarette. (Throwback to the old days, time when a sliver of a tree was soaked, smooshed flat and dried, then layed out in front of me and I scratched into it with ink from a sharp tipped vessel. We inhaled smoke then.) My Robot mumbles, loves my hands upon her. "Tell me why you did it" she says. I'm falling apart, but should call it beautiful.
Monday June 27th, 2005
“In darkness, save for flames, city’s desolation complete.”
Newspaper headline after the S.F. 1906 quake
It’s a fucked up city still. Nothing but bars and alleys to smoke drugs
in out of the light.
My liver is the city, ravaged and lonely.
It wasn’t the quake, an alcohol fire is the real source of ruin, laying
waste to the happy neighborhood of digestion, ripping up the infrastructure
of excretion, leaving my brains homeless and exposed.
People will remember the devastation. They always do.
June 25th, 2005 Saturday
The rebellion was fun for a little while,
But they didn’t want you if you were gay.
(in honor of Pride weekend in S.F)
June 24th, 2005 Friday
The bee’s are like ladies, and they keep a clean house.
They take the dead in their feet and with wings like a single prop they fly
off into the grass and drop their fallen sister to the earth.
June 23rd, 2005 Thursday
Ever driven a big truck drunk on company time? Maybe a friday afternoon, and all you need to do is park the damn thing and you're done for the day? The traffic is moving at 20 mph across the Bay Bridge and a stick ship at anchor sits there with all the hopes of a foreign born sailor floating in the ocean, and that 20 mph feels good, the buzz makes you want to cry you feel so lucky to be alive, and you keep moving.
(this is a poem)
June 22nd, 2005 Wednesday
Couldn’t find a donut shop in Reno
Took a while, at least.
Dirty napkin blew in the door
Across the red tiles from an old Burger King floor.
That napkin was like a rat.
An empty lot across the street probably had dead bodies beneath it.
And the empty shopping cart sitting out among the weeds? Nothing for the homeless
to bother collect. Even homeowners kept their cans. So the vagrants froze in
the winter behind warehouses or burned up in a pallet fire.
Thai immigrants boiling my little cakes in heated grease would stay warm when
the snow caught to the ground.
June 21st, 2005 Tuesday
I got an email reply from an grade/high school friend. I told everyone I know I am moving to the Mission to become a poet. My friend wrote and told me he just returned from Japan, where he sat in a Zen garden. The butterflies told him to write poetry. Haiku, specifically.
This poetry stuff is spreading. We called this guy LingLang and he could recite metal lyrics while drumming with Papermate's on the back of the seat of the bus. Now insects are begging him for poetry. The world is changing, and apparently there is an imbalance, a poetic vacuum. The rocks need our imagination to keep from turning back to sand.
I think Haiku is metered 7 5 7, meaning a line with 7 syllables, a line with 5, and one more with 7. Here is one I wrote, because my old friend's email was so inspiring.
Sitting in my kitchen
balls in the sun
happy to be naked.
Okay, mine goes 6 4 6, but the point is, it is one of those revelation poems that butterflies inspire.
(ATTENTION ALL KU WRITERS: further research indicates the traditional form is actually 5-7-5)
June 19th, 2005 Sunday
$10 CASH PRIZE
Simply create a hip hop style poem using this verse for inspiration:
I'll rock your crotch like Crawford Notch
That's all there is to it. Let's show the rest of the country that New Hampshire has more than 13 miles of coastline. We have soul, pride and power. Email me your entries and win some serious dough.
June 18th, 2005 Saturday
There are found poems, which are phrases that have the power of imagination and beauty a poet strives for, but they turn up unintentionally in a Yard Sale sign or a political speech. Here is an example I found while researching Vietnam.
"Let them burn, we will clap."
The first lady of Vietnam said this about the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive as a protest. She was the one we supported.
June 17th, 2005 Friday
For the next four months, I will be writing poetry here.
June 16th, 2005 Thursday
For those of you that read this stuff, you may recall I wrote a groundbreaking poem that found a way to rhyme with orange. Or so I thought. Here it is to refresh our memories.
“I went on a binge,
with an orange.
We broke into a school
And stole a computer.”
A very mean spirited and nasty man at work, who is probably bald, brought it to my attention that “a binge” does not technically rhyme with “orange”. At least not where he comes from.
“You should say it out loud” I told him.
“Maybe if you really force it, but it doesn’t make any sense anyway.”
He said.
Perhaps my coworker doesn’t live in a fanciful way that I do. For instance, earlier today, as I walked into the bathroom at the warehouse, I fancied one of my coworkers at the far end roll up door was disgruntled and shooting at me with a rifle as he stepped over a few bodies. I looked around the bathroom and tried to find a hiding spot. I looked up, thinking I could hide in the acoustical ceiling, but there was none. I would, I decided, take off all my clothes and stand by the urinal, so when he threw open the door he would be totally confused and I would gouge his eyes out with my thumbs. As I peed, I imagined myself the hero once again.
So, if I want to rhyme “a binge” with “an orange”, I fuckin’ will. I am the poet here. Once people start to understand that, things will start going a lot smoother.
“He’s just trying to help you”, The Family Man said to me. “It isn’t a perfect rhyme”.
So okay. Maybe I haven’t done what no poet has done before. But I thought I did for about three whole days. And that’s something.
June 14th, 2005 Tuesday
The joint on my middle finger of my left hand has been swollen for three weeks now. Rather than loose the damn thing, I went to the Haight Street Free Clinic - which as of January 2005 now charges on a sliding scale because in 2004 a trustee stole over a million dollars from the place. The sliding scale brought my bill to one dollar, and I gave them a ten with strict instructions to keep the change, but not for themselves. Then I walked into the examining room. The Clinic is a converted apartment. It is kind of charming, except for the memories I have of catching scabies last time I was here. Sure, it’s just body lice, I could have gotten it anywhere, but there are some gnarly people hanging out in the Haight Street (formerly) Free Clinic. It was either from them or from lying in a pile of homeless people clothes and making out with this girl in an abandoned building. Tough call. However, lesson learned.
Today I stood up in the waiting room and in the exam office, brought my own pen for paperwork, had surgical gloves on before I entered the building, and wore a respirator I had borrowed from work.
I was there the first time catching scabies because I thought I had cancerous
moles. Listening to public radio sometimes sends me into a panic. Driving home
a few days prior, I was listening to a health advocate tick off the markers
for skin cancer’s most likely target: light hair, blue eyes, very pale,
burned a lot as a child, have moles on body.
Five for five.
I had my shirt off in the car trying to remember what my moles looked like, to see if any had changed shape or color. I was crossing Market on 16th, just happened to be passing through The Castro. At the red light I realized a group of men were standing right at my truck window looking in as I was rubbing my body, feeling moles, frantic, half naked, putting on an unintentional erotic medical strip show.
But this is far from the point of trying to get my swollen finger checked out by a medical professional today. The kind woman at Haight Street Clinic told me hands were very precious and she didn’t know what was wrong with mine, so she sent me off to General. That meant the emergency room at the craziest hospital in the city. It just so happens I was no stranger to The General, being uninsured in the city myself for four years. These fine people sewed up my hernia two years ago. I can still feel the plastic mesh they stitched into my abdominal wall. Tougher than nature it is.
Would this trip be different? I had waited in line for hours while prisoners
on medical release stood shackled in pairs in front of me, the glare of their
orange jumpsuits making it hard to read the magazine I had brought with me.
Slightly different this time. The junkies were there, huddled up and crying
for pain killers, the immigrants with that immigrant look in their eyes sat
still like baby deer, unfazed by the sobbing and shivering, the yelling, the
children running amongst their legs and playing in the trash can. The television
was on incredibly loud, and I waited for three hours. Not bad.
There is always a little chair next to the exam table they want you to sit
in. This time I did. A woman came in and sat in another. She rested a clip board
in her lap.
“What’s wrong?”
I held my swollen middle finger next to my healthy one and told her it had been
swollen for three weeks.
She said, “It’s broken. We’ll get you an x-ray.”
“It can’t be broken. I never hurt it. It never bruised. I think
it’s a sting.”
She grabbed my hand, pulling, pushing.
“this hurt?”
No.
“this?”
No.
“When I do this?”
No.
“It’s not broken. Probably a sting. Put a splint on it, I’ll
write a scrip for Motrin.”
“If it’s a bite, why is it swollen for three weeks?
“Maybe it’s broken…”
“It can’t be broken…”
“How long has…”
This weird circular conversation actually had four or five turns around, and
I began to get dizzy and felt that I had to leave before someone took my appendix
out.
And my finger is still swollen, and now in a splint. I don’t know what
is wrong, so I just won’t move it. Sometimes I panic, sometimes I give
up and hope for the best.
June 9th 2005 Thursday
It sounds like Jack White is very mad about something. So many of the songs on his new album have one note struck over and over like a child banging on a pot. But it is electrified and adult, so it sounds angry.
Zev came up from San Louis Obispo tuesday night. He said he hated going to the movies and to rock shows and hated school all for the same reason.
"Everyone looks straight ahead, all the attention is focused on one thing, and for someone like me with such a delicate sense of self worth, I'm left feeling like nothing."
I've never heard anything like that before.
June 6th, 2005 Monday
Buddy, let me tell you a colon cleanse is a real eye opener. My upstairs neighbor got me to try this nutty thing with him. "We drink 16 ounces of olive oil in one hour, shit our brains out, then eat nothing but fruits and nuts for a week."
"I'm in." I said. I've been meaning to clean my colon for a while now.
Sunday night, after a late start to the day, and only eating some carrots and some cantalope, I was upstairs looking at a pint glass full of cold pressed olive oil. My neighbor and I. 32 ounces of oil. We locked eyes, and grabbed our glasses, going to see who could pound the whole glass first.
I thought I was swallowing gasoline. It was like I was drowning, the weird thick oil running between my teeth, coating my tongue, my throat, like cold metled butter it was slow to drain down my neck and after one gulp I cut it off. My neighbor was no farther ahead.
"Let's take it slow, and if anyone pukes, use this." He pulled out a big aluminum mixing bowl and placed it on the counter. We stood looking at our glasses. Mine said Miller Lite on it. I had given up drinking for a week to do this. It better fuck me up good. I took another pull.
"Suck on a lemon to cut the taste" my neighbor advised. I wasn't into that pussy shit. I was going to drink this like it was cheap whiskey. My third chug made me gag. I started to feel it come up my nose, but it was too dense and heavy to completely squeeze through the passage. I leaned against the formica counter top and reconsidered.
The lemon was delicious. My taste buds had been effectively tarred over by the sludgy oil, and the citrus cut it away. But I still had 11 ounces to go.
Half an hour passed, and I had pushed down about 14 ounces, and I was gagging at the very smell of olive oil at that point. "I'm going home to wait by the shitter" I told my neighbor, and I headed downstairs. Nothing happened, I waited and felt sick. Felt like I did when I drank an awful lot of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum on an empty stomach one night. I would burp and smell olive oil, and start to heave. But I had to keep it down, or what would get all that impacted shit out of my colon? Miller Lite would have done it. But I wasn't thinking like that.
I went to bed, sleeping leaned up against the wall so the churning in my stomach wouldn't spill out my mouth in my sleep. At approximately 4:30 a.m. I woke up and ran into my bathroom, only to fall to my knees and barf olive oil into my toilet bowl. This was exactly like that Capt. Morgan's overload now. My body got very cold and I began to shake. Who knew olive oil could deliver a top grade trip?
It took 25 hours for the poop to finally come out. My neighbor called me throughout the day for updates. He hadn't pooped until noon. "I went four times in an hour. The first one looked green." I don't know my neighbor that well. For instance, I don't know his last name. He had given me his phone number yesterday in case I had any questions, and now we were talking about our number two's.
That is what a drinking problem leads to.
June 2nd, 2005 Thursday
The Hard Rock Cafe in San Francisco was playing 80's videos. Shit, I think about a lot of stuff when I watch that shit. Back in the 80's I was in New Hampshire, had been to Florida once with my parents. Kids my age were skipping school and becoming skateboarding legends. I was smoking pot out of Pepsi cans at ramshackle campgrounds, behind wood sheds, in parked cars, anywhere the lighter would stay lit. All that time is gone and I wasted it. For sure. Tonight I was standing on a Bay Cruise boat loading on graduating seniors for Celebration Graduation, guessing in my mind which high schoolers had been titty fucked, which ones were sneaking in booze, and trying to spot the gay ones. Who decided to hire me for this gig, anyway?
June 1st, 2005 Wednesday
I love working in the city, around other humans. Or even just driving down a city street, and having someone to look at instead of a tree. Back when I lived in the sticks and worked construction, I'd stick my dick in a woodpile if I thought there was a snake in it. Man I was bored.