American Poetry (Or: A Writer's Confession)
No rules.
I can write anything.
Jimmy ate crabs all night the day before he killed himself.
Thomas wandered aimlessly until he bumped into the woman he married. This was outside a pornography store, but it’s something they never told their kids when the kids were old enough to wonder about such trivial messes such as how their parents met.
Everything can get printed.
I create the world.
The sky, maybe, could be cloudy but with small freckles of blue shining through as the two little league teams take the field. This could, maybe, be somebody’s memory that I just made up.
Just like writing is art - A painter can draw clocks melting over coffee tables, with an angry storm bellowing in the west, colors like acid ruining everything. A novel, or story, or poem, is to be metaphorically ingested and literally pondered. It will leave a mark but will change little more than leave a memory of something that never happened. Through a vast majority of a priori concepts, we as a people can picture these characters with no identification, DNA, or matter, going about through daily lives, echoing forever through the stream of conscious of some god-awful writer.
The children ask, “Where did you and dad meet?”
The mother doesn’t even have to reply. It’s all made up anyway.
She could say, “College,” or “Outside a pornography store,” or even, “I love you,” as she passes away, the question being a simple red herring to keep dear mother alive.
This is a story.
These are stories.
I, personally, get off on this stuff.
It was Nietzsche who, I believe, said something like, “All writing is a confession.” My confession, being the youngest, quietest, and most God-fearing of my family and friends is that I cannot tell you why I write. My confession is that nothing I’ve ever done has really added up to much, but when I write it has to, there is no other choice. The words hit the paper and I have an accomplishment. I spent years on a baseball field and my accomplishments amounted to metaphorical trophies (memories) in the attic (my head) and literal trophies in the attic. Little faceless golden baseball players taking forever cuts at a ball that never arrives, cold in the winter, musty, dry, dusty air…
My confession is that I maybe like to play God. Building people’s lives, forcing them to put guns to their heads and cry in front of a mirror, forcing them to walk home with the girl they love and have it all disappear as they lean in for a kiss and realize how long she’s been cheating on him. Or maybe I make them take up jogging because they got sick of being fat.
I give them names: Jason Miller, Coleman Arbridge, Decius Richter, Josh Bentley, Nick Fitt…
I give them occupations like janitor, confused businessman, aspiring writer, small-time drug dealer, and whatever else I feel. It’s almost like a video game, but I have the misfortune of doing the dirty work – I have to guide you through without letting you have the controller. In addition, I have to make it interesting enough for you to bear with me until I can get my true confession or lesson across.
Take this for instance:
Erica Carlisle hated math. Her hatred did not spawn from some inefficiency with numbers. All her life she’d actually been quite good at math. It was just that… well… she was scared of being molested.
He was an old man named Theodore Blakely. Mr. Blakely was a pervert who had a “thing” for fourteen-year-old girls. He kept it well-hidden enough to avoid chastisement from the school board but left it open enough to give the cute students an extra back rub or smile or talk after class.
On too many occasions she’d caught him making eyes at her – not just teacher/student eye contact, but deep, tunneling, awkward eye contact that made her squirm in her chair.
It eventually added up to her intentionally skipping his class nearly everyday. Anything was an excuse to cut. To make matters worse, any time she did show up he’d ask to see her after class. He never reported her absenteeism because he said he could “handle” the situation on his own.
Math was Erica’s last class, which made it so easy for her to skip. And so easy to take advantage of for him.
Today she made it to class because she heard from her friend Julie they had a test. After quickly scribbling any answer she could come up with she swiftly walked up to the desk and set it down and turned to leave. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rising, and just as she thought she’d make it out he heard her say, “Ms. Carlisle, can you please stay after class, we have something to discuss.” Her heart sank.
Erica spent the rest of the class planning on how she’s make her get-away if he came too close.
Pulling up the desk closest to hers as soon as everybody else had left the class, he put his hand on her shoulder, looked her unwaveringly in the eyes and asked if she was okay. Asked if things were okay at home. Asked if she missed her father, who’d died earlier in the year.
His warm hand traced down her arm as she answered, keeping a solid pressure and ending with a soft fingertip at the sensitive area at the joint of her upper arm and forearm.
When she answered, Erica had no idea what she said, her fear of him compelled her to just say whatever seemed to please him and allow her to get out of there. He asked if she didn’t like him. Asked if she thought the class was boring. Her throat was thick, and the words didn’t come out right. Asked if she felt she deserved more attention. He looked down at her chest. Maybe he could offer some hands-on help.
None of this was enough to incriminate him, she thought, trembling. She’d heard the stories about how bad he used to be. How he’d take girls into the closet in the back of the room and make them dance with him. How he’d teach them that one and one should never make three, and to use protection as they grow into womanhood.
Pepper spray.
Condoms.
Good judgment.
Nobody ever said anything. Most kids thought these were just stupid stories. Stuff to scare the little freshmen girls. But with a cupped hand wiping the hair from her eyes, Erica could feel the truth coming off him in waves of immorality.
He leaned in close to whisper something, his lips brushed against her cheek. At that, she started crying. She was his.
That’s a story. I just made that all up right there. I know it’s nothing special, nothing overwhelmingly profound or even well written. It’s just a story. It’s me playing the objective, omniscient third-person. Kind of like God. Some sort of sick God.
I’m watching all this happen with you. Shit, if I wanted Mr. Blakely to be a gay science teacher who coached football I could. If I wanted Mr. Blakely to be a normal guy, and have Erica be some paranoid low-grade schizophrenic, with enough research I could pull that off as well.
This is all my confession. Every last word.
I confess to you my brothers, sisters, readers, fans and those who really understand what I’m trying to confess – that I have no idea what I’m trying to do here. Accomplishment is enough for me.
A black dress falling from velvet shoulders, a little boy breathing in deeply readying to answer a question, and three elderly women treading carefully atop the frozen sidewalk in matching blue dresses on a solemn Sunday morning in December.
I love those thoughts. They’re just pictures for me, and with the right wording they’re not only pictures for you, but they go beyond that. A painting is there. A sentence involves interpreting the words into your own picture, and adding your own life to it. That is accomplishment – on both sides.
I set ‘em up, you knock ‘em down, so to speak
This is my pleasure. It’s what I do. And with any amount of talent, it’s what I’ll always do. Even when you’re not around. Even when I’m just a memory of a memory of a memory. A curly yellow photograph.
Here’s another story:
Decius Richter fought to open his eyes.
Outside, thirteen floors below mothers vacuuming and men off from work ogling pornography on the computer, a bus was pulling out onto the street carrying twelve nuns, one of which had been his third grade teacher, Sister Mary Therese, who’d taught him to say the alphabet backwards. It was merely coincidence that she was down there and he was up here.
Inside, back up the thirteen floors, sleep still clouded his eyes as he padded across his thick blue carpet to end the crying of his fucking alarm clock. In thirty minutes he’d be sitting at his cubicle further downtown on the sixty-seventh floor, zoned out and contemplating novel writing. Or maybe becoming a monk. Something quiet where you can wake up late with the sun up already.
A soft touch on the shoulder by a bald headed Buddhist must be how Heaven wakes up, he thought, gazing back at his dark green sheets and the pile of clothes at the foot of his single bed. Moments later he stepped into the shower, having tossed his boxers and t-shirt in the pile.
Early morning radiomen in helicopters call it a war-zone out there. Dawn’s early controlled chaos howling in the crowded streets below, too poor to insure a car, he thinks about the three block constitution to work, and how flip bitch chill cold it is out in the trenches. Every morning felt like a war he didn’t want to fight. Every day around this time he thought to himself, This is my life? It’s all lead up to this? It was hard for him to distinguish his misery from that of just one generation ago waking in rice paddies somewhere along the Song Tra Bong river.
Maybe I should’ve died in a war, he thought, that would have been much more romantic and purposeful. There has got to be more to it than this. There’s more. There’s more. There’s more.
Clever jingles chime across the airwaves, shower water finally heats too hot, working the pipes he thinks, Somebody else had dreams, somebody else wanted to be Robert Plant, or Jim Morrison, or Lou Reed, or Kurt Cobain, but instead he’s the man who sings the Soap advertisement. Decius, Decius, can we not find a way to stop whoring ourselves? Kills the water. Everything else it represents. This is evolution?
Another day at the office will kill me. Another day at the coffee machine, feeding my pay back into thankless machinery, inside brown bag lunches and the tightened Windsor knot noose around my neck, another day at work will kill me, he thinks, not caring how slippery the tile floor is below his feet as he steps out of the shower. There’s maybe a rug on the floor, maybe a towel on the door.
Toweled off and dressed in four day worn pants and a three day worn shirt, grabbing one of his two ties, shock jock radiomen have two lesbians on laps at this hour, just thirteen floors down and a short bus ride away from this very spot.
Next to the toaster waiting for bagels to pop back up. With no time to spread cream cheese, Decius jams each half into the Philadelphia Cream Cheese container and is awarded his shameful superfluous breakfast on the run.
Awkward silence in the elevator with the cute brunette who lives down the hall, who just might be a speed addict, leaves him with this thickness in his throat that might be a lodged piece of bagel. It’s not that he wants to choke, but maybe that would give him an excuse to talk to her… To maybe have some actual human contact. He thinks he might have read something like that in a book. But that was years ago.
“Where do I know you from?” she asks, with that tone that sounds like she’d been fighting to upload a memory that – like an impotent man – wouldn’t come.
Catching her eyes and immediately looking at the ground, he mumbles, “I live down the hall,” but it comes out all wrong, too early and harsh. Idiot, he thinks.
She loses interest rather quickly, “No, I thought I recognized you from something, like on TV or something. Maybe a long time ago?” she asked.
“Ahdunno,” Decius replied, and depression stabbed him in the temple. A bell rings and she steps out hurriedly. The brisk clack-clack, clack-clack of women’s dress shoes trots down the marble floors hurriedly, her jacket like a cape towards sun-up.
The sun was preparing the sky to peek on the horizon; the air was cold like fame ripped from the modest. His blue (and only) suit jacket wasn’t enough to battle the late autumn cold.
He knew he’d never see a blue sky all day. Months would pass where he’d feel like a mole, inside during the day only to crawl everywhere back home at night. Cars pass by noisily, some rattling from extra speakers in the trunk, some with mufflers falling off, some with nothing wrong with them. People pass noisily, some with cellular phones to their ears, some with pagers on their hips or purse, some with clicking heels and hard bottomed boots. Everything is noise everywhere.
Shivering, Decius places one foot in front of another. One more day of work won’t kill me, he thinks, but maybe hopefully it’ll put me on the DL.
With a tear that was possibly caused by the wind, or maybe by this thought, he places one foot in front of the other and mumbles, “That was fifteen years ago.”
The story moves on from there. But I don’t know where it goes. I’m still too young to know how anything ends, I kind of hope that’s always the case. Not all change is good – endings provide beginnings, yes, but more so they are endings. Signed, sealed, delivered. The story opens, the story happens, the story ends.
In the real world, or at least my perception of it, nothing ever comes wrapped up that tight besides life itself. You are born, you live, and you die. Everything before and after that is speculation and religion. Beyond that, life is much too complicated to be reflected in a story. Anything that begins, happens, and ends is just a segment of a segment of a segment.
I don’t know if I’m drawing an accurate enough picture. Allow me to demonstrate with a very quick story and commentary:
Jason realized he completely slept through an important midterm. His body shot out of bed, but soon after he realized that he had no power over the control of time, and all the physical movement and panic were just a waste of time and effort.
Collecting himself, he sat down and e-mailed his professor explaining his situation. His situation, he told the professor, was that his drunken roommate had accidentally unplugged his alarm clock when he was trying to unplug the Christmas lights they had hanging in their dorm room just before falling asleep. He asked his professor if there was any way to make up the exam, but understood if it was impossible.
Later that day he received an email from his teacher that said he understood and to come to his office. Jason sighed a relief, leaned back, gazed at his ceiling and began rubbing his eyes.
What I’m trying to say is that who knows what happened before those events transpired? Maybe Jason had spent the night arguing with his girlfriend and had slammed his hand down on the alarm clock when it started going off just an hour after his head hit the pillow. These things happen.
Possibly Jason went on to get a business degree at State University and lived the average American life, his only major trauma being the time he suspected his wife was cheating on him.
Or maybe a few weeks later he was so distraught with the fact that he was going bald at the tender age of 17 that he hung himself on the night before his 18th birthday with a one word suicide note that read: Vanity. Or maybe, when he looked to the sky it was a giant thank you to God. Maybe Jason was a devout Catholic who’d been telling the truth about his roommate unplugging the alarm clock.
What’s more than that is possibly the news of Jason’s vain suicide changed the life of his younger brother, who went on to become a famous novelist and anti-vanity activist.
All these stories intertwine and end up not even being of any relevance to the reader or character who is simply wrapped up in his or her own life to even notice with any real interest the things that really shape their lives.
That is the nature of this beast. This writing beast. It’s what frustrates me so much… and the reason most of my stories never end. I always want to expand. I always want to keep going into infinity with a thousand stories that all relate but never come together. When you think about it, that’s exactly how life is.
I guess I’m just a big fan of coincidence. It isn’t impossible that Erica Carlisle, Decius Richter, and Jason all listened to the same kind of music and all separately at one time in their lives met Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam. That is the essence of American Poetry. It drives famous movies, sit-coms, tragic plays, comedy, and even novels. Coincidence is the hidden murderer in every Agatha Christie novel.
Coincidence:
Bob went for a run and saw Jessie and waved. Jessie’s day was brightened because she’d always thought he was cute. On the drive back to her house she honked and waved at a complete stranger, who had been walking home from work after seeing his tire had deflated; he waved back but was confused because he didn’t recognize her car. He spent the rest of the walk home trying to think who it could have been. Upon entering his house, he hugged his wife and asked who the woman could have been. After going over all the details, it turned out that she was a co-worker with his wife, as they had both worked for the large insurance company headquartered in their town. The next day, the man’s wife meant to ask Jessie how she knew her husband, but never got the chance to because their building had to be evacuated because of an anthrax scare. The fright of the situation had made both her and her husband forget the whole question. Years later they ran into Jessie at a McDonald’s and by chance remembered that strange situation and asked her about it, she said she “[couldn’t] recall for the life of [her]”, but it might have had to do with all the drugs she was on for the cancer. She told them not to worry, though; she had a wonderful doctor. His name was Bob.
I love it.
All these little stupid stories that make up most of our lives; we never even think about them because we’re too wrapped up in who the woman who honked at us was, and we never step back.
In addition, most of these coincidences and tiny narratives don’t get remembered for the most important reason: No time to worry about that when tomorrow is such a big fucking mystery. Nobody takes the time to laugh at life’s little jokes because on the whole people make life out to be a big tragedy.
Nothing’s more tragic than bad comedy.
Nothing’s more comedic than bad tragedy.
It makes me wonder how children can smile so easily but it takes four bottles of bourbon and a new car to make anybody over the age of forty smile.
You want a struggle in this short story?
You want a theme?
They’re both the same.
People take themselves so seriously that their life becomes a giant Mensa Puzzle. Laughter ensues only when somebody takes a break from taking him or herself too seriously and steps back and cracks a smile at how fucking trivial (in a different sense, of course) it all really is.
I don’t know what to do with my life. I’m too moral to do drugs or abuse women. I’m too lazy to be anyone’s hero. And I’m too intelligent to be stupid enough not to care about the fact that I know all these things. Now, when I approach my education I am constantly asking myself, “How will this help me land a job after graduation?” as opposed to simply, “Is this what I want to learn?” Period.
It’s frustrating and dangerous to be born now. We all have to pay the debts our baby boomer predecessors accumulated. Because of appeasement that began over fifty years ago, I can’t walk into a tall building without an undercurrent of paranoia coursing through my subconscious. All this while worrying about how it is that I’m gonna fuck the generation to come.
When I was born I had to be put into an oven because my body temperature was dangerously low. Now, I have been put into a college institution because my level of expertise is dangerously low. In order to survive I have to bite the bullet and make the biggest decision of my life every single day. To be educated or to not be educated. I think, therefore I think I am.
To be blunt, I give you the story of two twenty-four year old friends that I know who went to a local university:
Chris blinked his eyes awake and felt a wicked kink in his neck. He looked around as early morning men in suits were reading early morning newspapers waiting for early morning trains. The dawn chorus still warming up in the orchestra pit, Chris put his hands on the bus station bench and twisted his torso left and right to stretch.
Sore hands feel along a week of facial hair, and Chris thought that he must look worse than he felt. Sadly enough, Chris was in happy spirits having stumbled across a ten-dollar bill that had ridden the wind and found itself tucked under an old newspaper. Earlier that day he’d overheard some old men waiting for a train talking about the onslaught of a “new kind of terror.” Having majored in Political Science back in his younger days at twenty-two, he figured the newspaper lying under the Central Park bench might have something to say about it.
When he picked it up he discovered his ticket to pay for gas and get the hell out of New York and start heading West for snow season.
Before he hit the road, after filling his van with his remaining money, he ventured over to the public library to send his best friend from back at school a quick email. After getting some rough glances from the snooty librarians (with good cause, as Chris was wearing his same army fatigues and a dirty blue hooded sweatshirt in the late fall crisp) he pulled up a chair to one of the complimentary computers on the second floor and began typing:
Tommy,
I think that I am having an early life crisis. I am looking for my life, and I don’t know what direction it is going to go. I have not been able to find what makes me happy. Maybe I am looking too hard, but I can’t stop until I find it. I think that I am on the right track and am going to keep looking. Tell me Tommy, you graduated college, you have a job, you have a roof over your head; what is it that you are looking for? I don’t have any of those things, and I don’t know what I am looking for. What is it that everyone wants? I bang my head when I think about it. What do we want? And when do we find it? Sometimes I think that I am going to go insane trying to find what I want. Other times it seems so clear. You know when I was walking from Mobile, AL to Meridian, MS… walking for 20+ miles a day in 90 degree weather eating only one meal a day, all that I wanted was to go to work from 9 to 5 and have a place to come home to that had beer and ice cream. That was it. And if I could have that right now, would I be happy?
I think that I am missing some gene or something that allows us to be content.
Oh well, anyhow. I don’t have an address. I’ve been living in my van for a while looking for a job. I just stopped by the library to write this so I could be able to keep you informed how I’ve been. I’m heading to Mt. Hood as soon as possible and my trip might take me through Ohio. I’ll drop by if I get a chance, and if my van will let me. Hope to see you soon. Take care Tommy. Your brother. Christopher.
Tommy had just finished eating when he got the call. Knowing precisely who it was he put his palms on his temples to control his frustration. Bear with it big man, this’ll only last a while. You’ll move on eventually.
He picked up the receiver, “Hello?”
“Thomas… yeah… I’m gonna need you to come in to work early tomorrow. Yeah… You see we’ve just been informed that our entire shipment has been misfiled and we’re gonna need you to sort out the mess. So I’ll see you at, say, six thirty? Tomorrow morning. B’bye.”
Tommy brought the phone down atop the receiver. He longed to be eighteen and starting college over again. Maybe this time around he would have ignored grade point average, his father, and his high school guidance counselor and gone for an Outdoor Recreation degree. Something where he could shave his head on the first of the month and determine how long he’d been in seclusion in the woods by how long his hair and beard got.
Somewhere with no forms or staplers.
It was Wednesday evening. Although he owned his own apartment, Tommy still looked around for family walking through the halls and in/out of the room like when he was a kid. Wednesday evening meant a couple popular television shows and some masturbation before he went to sleep at eleven because he’d have to wake up at five in the morning tomorrow to make it to work on time.
He had all the money he relatively needed. All tucked away in a jar above the refrigerator (in the bank), the money slept until he’d one day fall in love. Right?
He’d fall in love and get married and that’s where the money on top of the refrigerator would go – to his wife and kids.
Two years ago to this night he was drunk, a little high, and had a girl named Lindsey upstairs in his room of the house he shared with seven other guys. Wednesday night was beer-pong and then off to the bars to “go fishin’.”
Of course he couldn’t remember that day today, but it was more of the hauntingly fresh forgetting of it that really got to him. The more he looked back the more college turned into an ideal rather than a memory. He could remember how much he’d grown from the naïve kid he was in high school- to the mature, drunk college student he’d turned out to be. High school to him was ancient, happily departed history. It represented growth, esteem, and putting himself into a place in a world he would soon change through his energy and idealism.
No shit.
And now college took on a similar yet more of a harbinger effect. College was a time of energy and action, no doubt. He would carve a chunk out of the world and call it his own. Yeah!
And then he graduated, was filed into a nice niche and was expected to be just another brick in the wall. The whole thing choked him until he had to yell. But no, he could not yell unless he had written permission from his boss.
It’s this kind of overwhelming inability to control anything that had crushed him so quickly. He did not carve anything, except a nice ass-cushion on the couch. The television turning from a form of entertainment to an escape into idealism…
It got ugly sometimes.
So with all this weight on his shoulders, sitting in relative comfort, living the relatively ideal American middle-class life, Tommy wished he could just let go and hit the road. Discover that it is still possible to live. Figure out how to get into a real jam.
Live! How did that movie put it? Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. Carpe fucking diem!
Instead, he checked his email.
American poetry. It’s pain and confusion, and taking for granted that we live in the richest nation in the history of the world. I get so wrapped up in these stories -- it's all part of my confession. Tiny narratives, little voices all telling me what to write and who is about to get fucked over. It’s liberation. It’s American.
I love the country I live in. There is beauty in everything here. Everything is accomplishment taken for granted, moving forward - worry over the neighbor’s new car, new lawnmower, new wife…
On the other side of the world, aborigines sniff their piss because they don’t know any better. Instead of vanity, they have to worry about wisdom teeth growing through their lower jaw.
Where’s the fun and confusion in that?
American poetry. Two friends go to the same school and end up in different worlds. A former Little League World Series star realizes fifteen years has passed, and his life has peaked. All these things are seen as “tragic” but really they’re just life. This is the world I live in – a blank slate and aggression at my inability to make it worth anything more than a thought, or a story.
There was a game from my childhood called Ker-Plunk. Although it’s pathetic of me to say this, I see that game as juxtaposition to what I was referring to earlier. The idea that all our narrative lives crisscross (the whole six degrees of separation, but seen under a different light) and intersect and keep the idea of American Poetry afloat… In the game, there was a clear cylinder which you could place straws through it creating a removable type of platform which held up a collection of marbles from hitting the bottom of the cylinder. That’s the way I look at everyone. We’re all straws, keeping the marbles of existence “up” or “enjoyable.” Hence, when you’d remove a straw (or when somebody dies, or falls out of grace with you) there is that threat of some marbles making a plummet. When somebody dies, it makes you unhappy, when friendships end you end up morose. That is until that straw can be replaced with a new narrative. And in that way, stories really never end. The straws keep coming and going, and one day one of those straws will be you.
And that’s the beauty of life – its ability to be compared to a childhood game like Ker-Plunk. Through that idea, American Poetry takes on a new light. The most mundane person in America has their comedy and their tragedy. High points and low points. And then there’s people like me, waiting there to put some of it down on my slate, show it to the class, and vent my own aggressions into my own confession of writing. I confess to you, my family, my friends, my country, my people, my world, I will always love you for being so interesting, even when I hate you for making me realize that it’s only through loving “this” that I can hate “that.”
It’s just…
American Poetry.
One man's confession.
