A good discovery this week has been 750 words which after only three days has been great exercise. Its a private & free online writing journal which doesn’t mind if i type stream of consciousness to clear my head. I’d love to hand write but have trouble committing the time. Its a challenge to write everyday since I notice how lazy I am at night. Here at work, time floats in and out allowing me to write or do whatever. Using the websites stats I discovered I can type out 750 words in roughly a half hour. My preferred long hand with a pencil would double, triple that time. Here at the office I’m kinda stuck as to how to use my free time without seeming like a total jerk. I’m out in the open here — anyone can walk up behind me without me noticing– even my boss strolls past my desk back to his office so I can’t do anything scandalous. I’d love to zone out on and catch up with Naruto but that’s going a little far… Writing doesn’t bother anybody. I type fast and hard having been trained in the 6th grade on a manual. In a good rhythm I could nearly punch a computer keyboard in half. My 22 year old coworker reminds me often of such. Its been decades, yet I still feel the suspended letters at the end of those long metal arms and my need to push all-llll the way down to the bottom of the machine to make the lettering come in just right, just dark enough. You are right– i am an old dog. And I’m tired of tricking.

But I’m being future minded and need as much practice as I can get for my daily hide and go seek with poetry next month.

May I ‘write aloud’ that i’m a little concerned because I find myself doing practice runs, in looking and wondering that if I were writing a poem a day THIS month what would I write? You’d think i’d throw down a sample poem now, but– damn, even the Bad Stand Up form I played with didn’t yield any good juice for me. What to say? We’ll see. Wish ya boy luck.

****

And apropos of nothing….

Finally: I wish I could explain why i’m so fascinated by the video below. Its laundry porn, yea. But its beautiful in its clean simplicity. I’m a Virgo, sue me.

Wale– Opening Title Sequence

Listening to that Wale track I had two realizations. First: wow, this is a brilliant structure for a rap song. Then:

Hey! this might be a cool structure for a poem…

This is what I came up with:

****

What’s the deal with (one or lines)

how about ____________
how about ____________
how about ____________

Ain’t that something

What’s the deal with (one or two lines)

in the (news/airport/store) today ________
in the ________ today ______________
in the _______ today ________________

hey — what’s the deal with (one or two lines)

dontcha hate____________
dontcha hate____________
dontcha hate ___________
aint that something

****

Stand up comics and poets are not far removed from each other. You’ll remember one of Chappelle’s sketches about taking old jokes and performing them as poems. Its a great idea, but seems to me to work it needs be totally committed. Either you’re a poet using comedy or you’re a comic writing poetry. The earnestness in the attempt is what makes it work.

The structure is about questions. In a workshop I took years ago with Toi Derricotte, she underscored as a poet I need fall in love with the questions, and not be reliant on receiving any answers.

Finding an answer isn’t the artists strict responsibility. Perhaps that lies with the audience. The artists goal is to initiate dialogue with questions.

It seemed an interesting idea to take the tropes used in another field and break them open in a unique way. The more unusual the better. The poets responsibility is to deny the expectations of the ear.

The form may work best if approached as a potential monologue where something speaks about or to something else: God to man. A pet to an owner. A plant to the weather. An emotion to a person.

The structure can be rearranged or repeated to your needs, feelings.

I tried using this form for something specifically Not Funny: loneliness. Its okay. What if loneliness wanted to address people?

****

what’s the deal with your chest rising in a storm of sighs.

How about the shrapnel of loneliness falling in nuclear ash
How about being too bored to masturbate
How about the phone so silent its non-ringing keeps you awake
aint that something?

What’s the deal with weapons that don’t explode, just make whole cities depressed?

In the news today a man gave birth to himself then gave himself up for adoption
In the news today a woman witnessed a miracle but forgot what it was
In the news there’s a machine in japan that only operates when you pet it

What’s the deal with love and how it likes to play keep away when you need it the most?

Dontcha hate that optimism sounds like a disease
Dontcha hate the weight of the color of flowers
Dontcha hate the only touch you get comes from people who need you to move

aint that something

****

How about if you don’t “try’ to write, but hold back your effort to be pretty in poetry and just make a list?

****

What’s the deal with strawberries

how about asparagus
How about rutabegas
How about pumpkins
ain’t that something

whats the deal with milk

In the store today a man molested bread
In the store today a woman began weeping from the muzac
In the store today i heard apples singing

what’s the deal with hallucinations

dontcha hate eggshells
dontcha hate paying full price for a bag of air
dontcha hate plastic

aint that something

****

Try it. And please let me know what you think

my life has been impacted by a dream I don’t remember.

This is real: I was at my neice’s house. My sister—my neice’s aunt—was MIA the bulk of the evening I arrived. Another neice went to find and wake her and she then appeared. She breezed into the room and handed out hugs as if they’d been freshly baked, but said nothing to anyone. As a bee, she went from person to person, hugging them. I looked at her—she looked out of place, not herself. She looked like a troll—this sounds like a cap but its true. Her hair stood erect, carved. Her face bright and highlighting her freckles. She swam through us and vanished returning to sleep the rest of the day. I didn’t know she had pancreatic cancer. I wouldn’t see her alive again.

I remained at my neices house and she invited me to spend the night in her daughter’s bedroom. That night her daughter was attending a girls sleepover at the house next door.

In my younger neices’ bedroom, the walls were stapled and taped with images of boys, rappers in leather jackets, R&B singers standing in windstorms. They were all curly hair and mahogany skin and muscles and lips. She’d posted a letter on her wall from someone she knew in jail. His words were positive. More positive than mine, though I rarely said anything. Her pillows were tiny white pills. I laid down on my stomach, hugged a pillow, and slept.
I woke startled—just like in the movies. I lifted my head and saw it was nearing 1:30 the next afternoon. I leapt out of bed. I had never, not since I’d been a child in bed sick and on drugs, Ever slept that long. The night before nothing out of the usual happened. I hadn’t smoked much. I drank nothing. But I was taken aback in an unexplainable way. Something happened and I couldn’t explain what.

That next day was dark in my memory as if there were a lingering eclipse or an especially dark cloud shading everything. I don’t remember anything else: Except feeling uncomfortable like my clothes were suddenly two sizes too small. And I never came back to that house, I never returned to that city, and I never actively played family again.

Something rattled me deep.

My stepfather was the first to die within, maybe a month. Maybe longer, maybe not as long.

My sister, who passed out the hugs, was next.

I often think about that sinkhole in my memory. What did I see? Would it have frightened me to have held it and remembered? I think about that darkness instead of what I see clearly. The darkness whispered something that changed what I saw in the light.

That’s the purpose of dreaming, I presume.

****

In my dreams there are many houses.

After my grandfather died, I dreamed I visited his place in heaven.

His bed had a four tall posts and was positioned on a beach, between two huge basalt stones rising from the shallow of the shoreline. The hallways leading towards it were of glass and gold

***

The houses in my dreams are huge, busy with archetecture. Arteries of hallways. Multiple rooms as if it were a modern castle. Glass doors leading into generous bedrooms. The most recent house’s backyard was rolling green hills and a concrete path like a web connecting three neighbors. I distinctly remember my father with me in this house, his hands shyly in his pockets the whole time. I don’t recall if it was his place or he was just visiting like me. I was visiting and had to catch a bus to someplace else. I looked upon the backyard longingly and a little blond girl scooting on a small bike.

Every house has multiple stories.

Sometimes there are parties in gathering rooms in my dreams. I rarely recognize those in attendance (or they are all relatives) and I remain in the perifery overlooking the environment with the patience of a plant.

***

One dream ended in a huge field that didn’t grow anything. There was a single white house here and I sat on a motorcycle at the base of the steps while my best friend stood on the porch explaining how to ride. He stood with his arms folded, watching me and talking about how clutches work. He was supportive and parental and insistant I could do it without him. I never went inside the house, but started the cycle and sped over the ragged clods of tan earth and laughed.

***

There were a family ducks. I was last in line, towering above the animals who all focused on the lead duck as they went to a similar barren field as above. They obediently lined up and jumped down through a hole in the ground. Even the tiny bright yellow chick which went last. I stood over the hole they disappeared into; it was narrow and dark and deep. I reached my arm in up to the shoulder and felt nothing. I sat on my knees and gazed in, my heart thumping at my chest. I was too afraid to follow.

Black History month was fun. A challenge nearing the end of the month because I was running low on juicy ideas. There’s many folks to write about I hadn’t… but producing this daily plus having to work in a distracting office can be hard. Not to mention meditating on whom I wanted to write about.

Choosing a person or topic was totally up to what my brain found appealing. Respect: But I’m personally bored by Madame CJ Walker and Elijah McCoy. They get so much attention as to be black history cliches. I want to know about the history behind dissing fools in rap music or compel somebody to properly release To Sleep With Anger on DVD.

But the month was great exercise and a nice way to get my brain ready for writing poetry this April.

I hope I don’t get in trouble. I feel like a stalker– especially yesterday on the train. I keep imagining that if I have to write a poem, what would it be about? Last night I stood on a crowded train. I studied hands clasping the railing above. How hair rose off the back of this one dudes arm in tiny flames. The Indian dudes who all huddle together so tightly and talk like boys kicking soccer balls. The oceanic waves of brown hair on the woman next to me, the sweet and stale scent of her coat drying from an earlier rain. All nice– but nothing immediately striking me enough to want to write.

Until the train emerged from the tunnel. I turned to look back at the city and saw the city in a gray silhouette through the fog. Above the bowl of downtown, planetary clouds and the sun’s columns of gold light neatly slicing buildings at odd intervals and spotlighting random parts of the bay water. The clouds looked ragged as if something recently exploded.

This I could write about. And was compelled to make some notes. The poem, raw and as of yet loose & unthreaded, has promise.

This is just to say, I’m setting my intention to pay attention. To remain vigilant and search for good poems. My lesson from last year was that its possible to write and find a poem every day. Its hide and go seek in plain sight. Perhaps I missed the poem in the choreography of hair on the back of an arm, the stasis in a face that waits, the scent rising from another person. But that’s my loss. I just have to attend to a deeper attention, search for god & beauty in everything. And write without ceasing. Game on