Apologetic Antecedents

Sorry seems so hard
because it’s just the beginning.
There’s never a “sorry”
then a yank,
a little blood,
and “all done”
like pulling a tooth when you’re eight.

It’s always something painful and awkward
like “sorry I was a dick and screwed your sister
on the washing machine at Thanksgiving
while you were in the kitchen making cranberry sauce”
just to give a possible,
yet completely fictional
example.

Sorry is always the precursor
to something that sucks,
but has to be done,
like putting iodine on a cut,
or breaking up with the girl
that cheated on you with your brother
and his wife
even though she’s all kinds of a freak
and does that thing you like
in bed.

So it’s not the word that’s hard,
it’s what follows.

Enforced Solitude

Sitting in the window
looking for you,
watching the birds
and dog run free
while I content myself
with clawing up the new toilet paper roll
and pooping in your new heels
again.
Mondays are the hardest day,
I think,
for cats.

I know, right?

Here’s a video of “Better Home” that I recorded a few nights ago in my home office.

But I had a good time at the Open Mike and will definitely be back next month. Everyone was very welcoming, very supportive, and generally very good. I was concerned about the quality when I first arrived, because it’s hard to know going in what the level of suck will be at any open mike event, but there were only a few people all night that I thought couldn’t really write, and one of the best ways for them to improve is to be exposed to better writers. Several folks weren’t terribly good performers, but I might be a little bit of a snob there, with 20 years of theatre in my background. But most people were pretty good, and one girl in particular did a slam-style memorized piece that was just beautiful and made me wish I’d done video of the whole night so I could catch her performance.

She was one of only two people of color at the event, and it only reinforced the sense I’m developing about where poetry is sitting today. It seems like white people write their stuff down and read it out loud, while brown people tend to memorize their stuff and perform it. My friend Q is a member of the Charlotte Slam Team, and has been to the National Poetry Slam several times, and he’s one of the best poets I know. But I don’t know that he submits stuff to magazines and websites because I don’t know how much his stuff works in a written format. Watching him perform is fantastic, but if there’s no bridge between slam poetry and traditional written poetry, where is it all going to go? There are a lot of poetry events all around Charlotte every week, but they all seem to happen at clubs (and too late for me on school nights) that cater to a more typically African-American crowd. So I guess here’s my question – is performed poetry a “black thing” nowadays? Does that leave written poetry to be a “white thing?” And where does that leave people like me, white folks who are performers and writers? Is there a middle ground to bring the slam poets and the written poets together?

I hope all that doesn’t get me in John Mayer-esque trouble, but it’s kinda where my head is at with trying to figure out how to make poetry more vital to people’s everyday life.

Then the challenges with living at home will begin. Obviously most folks don’t think about recovering from surgery when they’re picking out a home, but just for the record, a split-level is not the way to go. No matter what you wanna do, there are stairs involved. Now if we were a little smarter, we would have set the guest bedroom up downstairs, so that Suzy could move between the guest room and the den, but no, that’s my office. So we’re trying to figure out if she’ll be more comfortable spending most of her time downstairs or up in the bedroom. I’m guessing it’s going to be downstairs, just because that’s way more convenient for visitors to sit. It’s not like we’ve got a lot chairs in our bedroom. So I think most of her waking time will be downstairs, which is okay, because she can sit or recline either in the recliner or on the sofa, and there’s a little dorm fridge down there for snacks and stuff. My sister is coming up tomorrow to stay a couple of days and help out, and friends have volunteered to bring over dinner Saturday and Sunday (tomorrow night’s dinner is still available if any of you have an overwhelming desire to feed people).

The outpouring of well-wishes through Twitter and Facebook has been simply amazing, and we appreciate the flowers (and yes, Otis, I will provide photos of me drinking beer out of the smiley-face mug). This has been a rough week, but all of you guys have made it a lot easier. So thanks. A lot.

This poem started life as a piece of a song that came to me in a dream, and I suppose I should be thankful it was as short as it turned out to be, since the last thing I wrote off a dream ended up around 65,000 words. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think there’s something in there. Let me know what you think.
Homecoming

I drove back to hell today,

walked in through the front door.

I went back to see my brother,

mother and my sister

but my father said “I have no son”

and they turned me away.

I drove back to hell today,

stood on the front porch

crying to come in

while my mother stared right through me

my tears standing in her eyes.

I drove back to hell today,

but my sister would not leave with me.

She just stood there holding Daddy’s arm

grinning like she’d won a prize

’til I finally turned away.

Now that we got that out of the way, the point of this is that the iPhone has a free app that mimics the Amazon Kindle. Now some folks have wondered to me about the size of the screen, but let’s face it, the words are the same size as a paperback book, you just have fewer on the screen at one time than on a page. No big deal. So I love the app, and have bought several books for the Kindle as a result. And it was during some of my shopping the other day that I thought “Am I actively devaluing the book by searching for passable free books for my phone?”

Because I have a limited budget, and a stack of books waist-high in my house that I haven’t read, I’m on a moratorium on book-buying. This doesn’t mean I haven’t bought any new books, it just means that I don’t buy nearly as many and have the good grace to feel bad about it when I do. So I finished the last book on my phone, and went looking for another. And I cruised the bestseller list and decided not to pay any real money for an e-book this week, then moved on to the free books. Now most of these books are like crack, one free sample in a series to get you hooked, which I think is a good marketing ploy, but some of the others are just books that people have written that are out there for free.

And some of these are free for a reason. Namely, they suck. I’m all for the idea of allowing the market to determine the relative worth of a product, and allowing consumers to even set pricing for things by their decisions to buy or not to buy something. But I wonder about the market for writing becoming so devalued by the presence of so much free content out there. Already I see freelancers talking about rate cuts, and there’s always another kid coming along willing to do the same work for 2/3 the money, and there’s always somebody willing to sacrifice a quality writer on the altar of the dollar, but I wonder if the same deal transfers.

So am I devaluing my own work by becoming a lowest common denominator consumer? Is this the same as a local store owner shopping at Wal-Mart and feeling guilty? Or am I just overthinking again? I do believe that as people try to survive in a challenging economy, we need to make choices on where our money goes. And we need to make conscious, personal decisions regarding our spending, and on what we value. So I’m pretty sure I’ve answered my own question, and justified buying more e-books instead of grabbing free ones, but what about the bigger picture?

On the smaller picture front, here’s another video from Returning the Favor.

And of course because I’m a cheap fuck I didn’t buy a tripod for my new handheld HD camera, so I’m using the built-in cam on the Mac. Here’s the first one, the quality may improve as I go along. Or I may decide this is a huge pain in the ass and just watch football. Frankly, after I get this uploaded I’m watching football regardless.

Road Blues

Yeah, I’m travelling right before Christmas, but I get Thursday and Friday off, so it’s okay I guess. I’ll probably blow out of here a little early tomorrow and head north so as not to get trapped in Atlanta’s hellish traffic. I think I’ll download Episode 4 of the Gambling Tales Podcast to listen to on the road. If you haven’t heard it yet, get your ass over to the website or to iTunes and check it out. I think Special K and I are really starting to hit our stride, and we’re working on getting some more great guests for upcoming shows. This episode features poker author, online card room manager and all-around prince of a human being, Lee Jones.

In the meantime, here are a couple of new pieces I’m working on. And if you’re in Charlotte on January 23, I’ll be hosting another Writer’s Showcase at Story Slam on Central Avenue. I haven’t locked in the lineup yet, but it’ll definitely be me and Steve Stoekel of the Spongetones fame. I’ll let you know more details as they become available.

EDIT: Can’t get both of them to post right so I’ll toss the next one up in a separate post. I would enjoy feedback on both.

EDIT: All unpublished poems have been taken down until I get through submitting them to various magazines so they’ll maintain their unpublished status.

I don’t see him dragging a stolen Food Lion grocery cart uphill
loaded down with a hot water heater and cans picked up
off the side of the road
heading for the recycling center hoping for just enough
to get another bottle of get me through the night.
I don’t see her pay for a corn dog and cup of complimentary ice
with pennies and haul the seven mismatched garbage bags
that make up her whole world out into the heat of the August afternoon.
I don’t see him sitting in the rain mumbling at nothing
and carving names into his wiry limbs with a rusty jacknife
while his own blood drips pink
and runs off down the sidewalk,
puddling for a second around my Ecco loafers.
But I see you
kneeling in front of a wild-eyed Walt Whitman madman
to say “hey man, you alright?”
I look at you
in your duct-taped Doc Martens
thrift-store Dickie’s work shirt
maybe a dollar and a half in your own pocket
while you kneel on the wet concrete
to touch the face of a stranger
and for a minute
before the world washes my vision away again
I see.

I’m drinking a lukewarm Miller Lite trying not to notice
the fat woman testing the superstructure of her halter top
and the suspension of her ’93 Yellow Geo Tracker.
Her flip-flops thwack-splish thwack-splish
across the parking lot looking for a vacancy
and maybe a little shelter from the storm.

I put a little Jessica Lea Mayfield on the in-room iPod rig
and prop my bare feet up on the wet wrought iron railing,
letting the dog-daily 4 o’clock shower
wash 300 miles off my tired feet.

A dragonfly wanders by for a sip of my beer.
I share.
He doesn’t drink much, but it looks like enough
’cause he flies off in a meandering besotted path
beating his wings in time to the music
and dancing between the raindrops.

That’s kinda what the last half of my week was like. I put in somewhere around 1,500 miles from Sunday to Friday, and had more than one project crisis to deal with along the way. All in all it was the kind of week that you’re really happy to see the back side of. So now that I’m looking at the back side of it, we’ll see if there’s any ammunition for stories or poems in there.