Chronological Conundrum

You are impeccable

In your watching and reading.

Your words are always worth hearing.

You are interesting,

But I didn't find that out

Until I was already interested.

I don't know how you managed it.

Get Crackin'

Life is a familiar mystery,

A woman's body language,

A foreign tongue I haven't used in ten years,

A complicated technical jargon,

A substitution cypher.

I can read it, but I don't know what it means.

My Own Hypocrisy

A poet finds a reliable refuge in audacity,

Which is liable to become refuge in hypocrisy,

Comfort in the things he does with his pen, between the sheets,

But hypocrisy is the most human of honesties.

No matter how many times I drew inspiration from mediocrity,

Only to rail against life's banality,

Only to rail against heaven and earth,

I always believed in the work.

I suppose the poet is a jerk.

Those Things They Told Me

They told me school would make me a well-rounded person,

and they were right.

When I came back to college four years ago,

I was shaped something like a letter V or a letter Y,

and now I'm kind of a round guy.

They told me that my writing was a waste of time,

and they were right,

Because no matter how many times a few people liked it,

No matter how much of my own joy made an audience irrelevant,

No matter how many times I haven't broken down publicly,

Criminally

(and believe me, I would have liked...),

They won't be convinced otherwise.

They told me that substitute teaching

Would be a valuable experience.

It has been an experience –

Where I learned to teach unplanned,

Unsuspecting and underprepared,

Without rapport or relationships,

Without anything the professors told me

Was the essential, was the base–

and I learned that I'll still be okay.

So I have a few things to say, or at least to vent–

Neither truth nor its speakers are prophets heaven-sent.

I suspect some lie, blind, into truth, on accident,

Or that they told me some things they didn't believe themselves.

(There's a taste of the things I've been wanting to tell.)

Island

You tell me “no man is an island.”

That's an interesting idea,

and one that brings you some comfort,

Which you'll no doubt continue to preach.

You insist that that I'll have to come crawling back,

To seek contact and company,

But the man who doesn't need to be believed

Doesn't need to be seen,

Which must no doubt be frightening.

How would you get leverage on him?

Until My Head Gives In

I am not a sword or a pen.

I am the head of a battering ram,

A legion of foregone writers behind me,

Too many to count or stop or read,

and if they should stumble over debris,

Perhaps the precise prison of our economy,

Our precisely pathological love of money,

Then, by their momentum, on I shall carry,

Until my head gives in.

Show Me How to Show Myself

It is not a matter of following all the steps,

But a way of stepping off the path into greener grass.

It is not a matter of preparation,

But a way of being comfortable unprepared.

It is not a matter of knowing what to do,

But a way of stringing mistakes together with style.

It is not a matter of putting the pieces together,

But a way of being whole, despite defect, despite flaw,

Despite profound empty places in one life's experience of the world,

Of painstakingly placing my list shred of sanity

Into my little, black book of madness–to close it again,

So I can show the world what is left.