Writer's Block: Winter Trees

 

The winds hits

On the hill

Slipping my feet

Cutting my face

In my hands

Saw and shears

It is time

For more trimming.

 

Cankers, rots

Branches broken

By fecund spurs

A tumor

A spot for feeding

It all

Has to go.

 

What do I think

While my shoulders ache?

I think about people

Politics

Ancient video games

My wife

My last days

In the sun.

 

Every season

Is a circle

Some hate this

And spend their lives

Running out of the loop.

I've been in a circle

For a while.

It grows larger

Every year.

How I feel about it

Changes

From season to season.

 

We are in the dying times

But we'll soon be elsewhere.

There's nothing left to say

There is plenty left to do.

 

Writer's Block: Twilight

Light falls

In an empty room

A silence weighted

As dust is weighted

Particles and beams and dreams

That float through the spaces

In between.

Our bodies are quiet

Except for the mechanical noises

The rhythmic functioning of gears

Grinding away in bone cases.

I am meat in a dusty tray;

You are wrapped like a fish in paper;

We are motionless

Sleeping the death of a still room.

Do we whisper our prayers

Begging favors from phantoms of dusk

Giving the void our hope

Hoping it will not be swallowed

Like light in the darkness.

Goodnight

Goodnight

Goodnight.

Writer's Block: Bad Poetry: Liberal Tears

 

Four more years, four more years

 

Wash it down with liberal tears

 

I don't see what I don't hear

 

All I crave is liberal tears

 

Got my own and you've got yours

 

Trump's got his, and fuck the poors

 

What we need is a religious core

 

Dark and dank and kept by whores

 

When the moon is high above

 

And hearts are full with relentless love

 

I will do the bloody deed

 

Pledge my soul to goats and thieves

 

Any price is good to pay

 

To ensure a lack of day

 

If Cthulhu sleeps in seas below

 

Dead as death and twice as low

 

Donald high as starry sky

 

I will not begin to cry and cry

 

For though I do not lack in fears

 

All I want is liberal tears 

 

I give myself in thought and word

 

To a balding, selfish turd

 

Liberal tears, liberal tears

 

All I want are liberal tears

 

Writer's Block: The Human Condition

Just discovered this awful old poem in a notebook. I probably wrote it at a slow farmers' market, hah.

The Human Condition

rain falling like black leather,

A smitten fool counts his change,

Blood between his fingernails,

A thesis hanging on his doorway.

"What do you smell?

What seems to be on the wind,

Repeating its name like an epitaph,

The last chapter of a banned book?"

He doesn't know; what can you know,

Standing in the fetal position,

Hunched over like a man taking his last breath?

Love is the grease that sticks in his teeth,

Love is the weight that stoops his shoulders,

Love sits in his chest like an atom bomb.

The sky changes, its mood as sour as beer.

"What do you feed a dying man?

The same gruel you feed everyone else."

Who is this stranger speaking to the wind,

This wretch haunting alcoves, smoking steam,

Making plans that will never materialize?

He is you or me; he is just a vessel,

A trick played by a bad magician,

A rock that moves and speaks.

You strike anything enough,

It will crumble.

 

Writer's Block: A Poem For Luigi Mangione

 

Luigi was very handsome.

He looked like the kind of guy

Who could weave amongst a flock of girls

And tell them how he was the choice of the room;

The crème de la crème,

A tall cool glass of water,

The big cheese.

But he wrapped a hood around his head like a bag

And shot a man he didn’t know in the back

Like he was judge, jury, and executioner.

When you shoot a man

Make sure you look him in the eye

Otherwise, how can you see his soul

Leaving his body and reckon

with what you have done?

Were we finding our voice

With a murder in the street?

Or were we lashing out

Like a toddler unsure of what he wants to hit?

I dunno about you

but I don’t care about all that.

A myth is a story that we create and believe

Even when our eyes tell us

That we aren’t seeing the truth.

 

Prison isn’t where you should be, Luigi

But you’re not God.

Let’s not all lose hope.

Writer's Block: The Sandwich

The Sandwich

What is left

In this burned-out bungalow

But scattered crumbs

Tracing a trail

Leading from my room to yours.


I had it once;

Once there was something

I held it in my hands

The impalpable made tangible

A flame lit by the invisible rays of the sun.


You can't start a fire

To save your life.

Similarly, I can't find anything to eat

But a moldy disease someone left

Festering in the corner of your room.


Jesus, take this thing

Divide it amongst the people

Let it nourish and sate

Their terrible, ravenous hunger

And then leave.


Honestly, I don't deserve

The sandwich.

You do; I give credit

Where it is due.

Hallelujah.

How to Overcome Writer's Block

You've been sweating it out behind the desk, smoking pack after pack of cigarettes, drinking like Hemingway, typing the same sentence over and over again like you're in The Shining. Your dream of becoming a successful writer is being held back by your lack of imagination. Here's a handy dandy guide to getting back on track.

1. Start drinking/smoking/abusing substances more. Every great writer was a drunk. The aforementioned Hemingway, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald. David Foster Wallace was addicted to marijuana, somehow. So start slamming back some brews and start typing what comes to mind. If it's nonsense, so what? You've written something. Congratulations.

2. Read more. Doesn't matter what. Cookbooks, advertisements, subway scrawl. It's all relevant and part of the human condition. If an actual novel sneaks its way in there, all the better. I personally become inspired by reading Glamor and Cosmopolitan. Such periodicals really hammer home the banality of existence.

3. Let Yourself Go. This kind of goes with number one. Grow out your beard, stop shaving your legs. Dress in antiquated clothing, but make sure it's filthy and stinking like the clothes of a homeless person. Fart in public. When someone offers you their hand, spit in it. Stop brushing your teeth. Gargle with mayonnaise.

4. Embrace the Occult/Scientology/Black Jesus. You need to believe in something if you're going to be a writer. The crazier the better. A writer is a spewer of bullshit. A writer is a true believer. A writer is one step away from becoming a politician.

5. Put It All Together. The disparate parts of your life, the pieces that don't seem to fit, stick them together with duct tape. Some bastard cut you off in traffic? Murder him in your horror novel. Tired of the predictable banter of your average sitcom? Write a subversive riff on the genre.

6. Start a Blog. No one will read it, but who cares? The blog serves as a sketch pad, an arena for doodling. Art must be presented to other people to be consider art, according to a professor I once had. He was a dwarf with a speech impediment who wrote about Hitler's mustache in his poems.

7. Just Do It. Life is a Nike commercial. 

Writer's Block: Lord, Deliver Us from the Boomers

Lord, deliver us from the Boomers

Though they toss and turn

And throw their own feces about,

Give us the strength to dodge

Said thrown feces,

Also, give us a giant broom,

A wastebasket,

And a pacifier,

To aid in the cleaning of their mess.

What a hellscape they left,

An endless land of desert and dust

Where the sun doth shine

On every corner and crevice,

Where only the rats,

Roaches,

And reptiles roam.

They had theirs, and now we will have ours,

And ours is the refuse they have left on our doorstep.

Thanks a lot, guys.

But do me this pittance,

And never bitch about Millennials again.

Writer's Block: Apocalypse

 

Traffic stops as they come

Flags waving in the back of trucks

Signs stuck to the sides of vans

The sociopathic grin photoshopped to manikin status

They celebrate the facade

The fake god they have built

Out of a narcissist's husk.

White pale faces,

Women and men shaped like pears

Standing on the side of the highway

Hooting and hollering at the dumbness on display

What a glorious celebration of stupidity

What a backwards march toward oblivion

Shooting fireworks off in the daylight

Cops stopping traffic to force us to behold

The righteous devotion to idolatry.

For the sake of all of us

I hope these people do not get what they deserve. 

Writer's Block: The Boys

Teasey wakes up and demands his biscuits

The milk must be poured just so

The water must be half-filled with ice

and if any of it is wrong

There will be holy hell to pay.

Outside later Harrison flips cicadas

and carries them on a stick to safety.

If Teasey catches one, they are dead

Their little husks brittle and oozing

in-between his tiny hands.

At the grocery store he scatters a whole carton of blueberries.

I make Harrison wait on a bench so that his sticky fingers

do not adhere to any chocolate bars in the checkout aisle.

"I'm a fire engine, I'm a rat in a cage,

I'm a tongue singing without a mouth," sings my eldest.

Together they scream as loudly as they can

while tearing my couch to pieces.

I let them wail on me,

little fists of rage, eyes eager and mouths grinning

hopelessly toothy grins of malice.

What joy there is in watching these monsters grow.

What have I unleashed upon the world?

You cannot convince me that the world does not deserve it.