Posts Tagged Day Job
The Ladies Don’t Want to Be Here
Sadness blows gray puffs from her turquoise.
Plugs don’t plug, and wires cross paths
with irritable tempers floating on the scum
of dirty rugs, where mirrors from monitors
shatter self, bright logs that support nothing
but pink coffins. Some gracefully leave
urgently, if only to save their remaining
sensibility, to float away with sticky wings,
unstuck but for the grace of gods who visit
only occasionly, who (the gods) sneer helplessly
at squeaky, rolling chairs, and the wires spark
despite masterful electrical architecture. The one
with the tubby brain thinks herself important
despite evidence to the contrary, thinks
the customers should love her, arrogantly,
just as management would want, but it is this
that is most insane as we watch time fly
by our worthlessness, laughing (time) at our ugly
building, crying at our tireless, circular motions,
wanting (time) to take us out of the game forever,
and all of this makes me want my Mozart.
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In Case You Didn’t Know
A day late, and always short on dollars, here’s my shot at PAD 11, a challenge to write a poem involving the phrase “In case…”
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In Case You Didn’t Know
The lady in front of you, crawling,
intensely tight, lacking a gas pedal
is not attempting to make you late
for work. She had eye surgery two
weeks ago, and not one of her four
children was willing to take her
to the doctor today, that the boy
presently trudging across the bridge,
looking up as if looking for a space-
ship is not contemplating suicide
by jumping off the bridge as you have
concluded, mostly because you
have never seen someone walk
across that bridge and he does look
spaced and gone from this world,
that when you are thinking you
are a failure, you might be wrong,
that when you also feel gone from
this world, you are here, and some
slice of fucking goodness makes
you persist in this increasingly
futile activity, that sometimes, no
matter how hateful some may seem,
sometimes, some people like you,
that they are battling demons and
they grip tightly to prevent you from
seeing this in them, but you don’t
talk and no one talks to you,
so in case you didn’t know, you are
not alone, but life is the loneliest
plot created by those before us.
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Lessons on Madness and Flow
Lessons on Madness and Flow
Rolling back, go gentle,
pray with the blackbirds
as they scatter to the soft
trees, trees bending graciously
with bright air, and remember
the leaves are moving for you,
so move with them and when
particles of evil come after you
fast and hard, duck down on a
slight bend and feel the energy
as yours, and if someone greets
you, smile at the beauty of being
there and remember those knives
from people who don’t know you
are false, and dig with integrity
to live as you wish, and this I tell
myself, each day, trying to be
the man I want to be someday.
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Against the Minuses
This is my poem for Day 5 of the PAD 2013 challenge. I’m having fun writing more than I have been and forcing my editor to sit on the back bench instead of guarding the front gate.
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The work was a drag, but the music,
a plus. Tornadoes of gossip, wiped
by Mahler or the trinkly angels
of Beethoven’s Seventh. The edits,
the critics, but cubicle walls, a plus.
Crystal, a plus, she floated through
the hallways, another angel, dainty
with perfect shapes and glorious smiles
with reddish hair. The windows exposed
dystopian architecture, but the angles,
a plus, forging desperate thinking, clever
gimmicks. The carpet, not so staid,
with patterns of light dark medium dark
light, a plus, and, the biggest plus, three
four five four three, ending with two threes;
and march to fives, a plus when permeated
with a need to meditate, need to soften the blows
of the day, the battering of pride, which perhaps
should be gone, where we keep our heads down
so we don’t know about being disregarded,
and that’s a plus.
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Hold That Noise
Late to the game, I am attempting the Writer’s Digest Poem A Day Challenge for National Poetry Month. I’ll catch up on the prior day on some other day. Today’s was to write a poem which has a title that begins with “Hold That ______”
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Hold That Noise
Morning fills with the whirring
of how I might do well today,
and then cacophony
of justification, of defense,
of false comfort, for when
I get here, I’m lost, for-
saken, worthless, dreaming
of when I might do well.
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Revolutions – This Isn’t a Poem, but I Don’t Write Fucking Essays
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose, Poems on March 18, 2013
Here today, things started to change dramatically.
Do you know, when I just said that, I knew it was false,
but it’s hope, so fuck ‘em. So for a few minutes, I thought,
I might be a writer. To me, that meant I might be a decent
human being. I have this blind sense that humans need to
have a central purpose, a reason for going on despite all
the facts that seem to recommend action to the contrary, but
it is blind because I don’t know other humans well enough
to know that they need a purpose. In fact, often, I wonder
how these integrated, bloated masses of people get along
without purpose because they simply trudge through, yes,
contented, but vacuous, contented with eating three meals,
with chips and snacks and pops, and weekend trips to the
lake ( THE fucking lake), and working on these schedules
that are preposterous, barely having time to hug the dog,
rarely awaking without an alarm designed to send humans
into blind destitute, where they don’t know how empty all of the
facades are, and I sit here, wanting to spit on my new pants,
wanting to throw the cafeteria tray across the room, blowing
out the perfectly-clean window which teases me with a Zen
garden that is never used for true purpose, not for lack of need,
but because the minds are entrapped in this buzzing hum
of doing what responsible adults and other gurus have told us
we are meant to do, despite our god-given sense that we waste
this gift of life every day, each day with these millions of
moments that spin down clockwise through snake-cleaned
drains made of the detritus of all of the gold we mined in the
good days when living in a tent and eating smoked rabbit
was a good thing. Here I am praying for a revolution that will
turn me into a writer and allow me to live out my days,
comfortable in some sense of purpose, praying that there
are people who might read and might be changed in the
slightest, because if I can touch a few people with writing and
eat a bit of rabbit, what would be wrong with me, but I’m scared
in the end, remembering those nightmares of walking out of
my tent and hanging myself with heavy rope on the sturdy,
horizontal limb of the old oak tree, ending what seems to be a
useless quest, a useless longing to rid myself of this vast,
empty purposelessness. And here I am wondering what kind
of stupid fuck would write about writing, and I stop. I’m due
back in my cubicle.
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The Carved Carcasses of Cranial Cacophony
Sitting, uncomfortably warm, clammy, I plotted
drawing a picture with words but all that I could do
was come up with a title. I love the title, but now
I couldn’t possibly tell you what it is that I feel
as I have fallen into this crevice of my spirit, a jagged
pair of cliffs pinning me to my feverish desires, showing
me fields of acres of perfectly windswept snow with
three little blades of Kansas grassy stuff protruding
to warn me away, to ask me to take the dullest carving
knife and start splitting out all of those parts of my
defective brain, hoping to pinch off bits of the ravaged
spirit, pulling from the sinewy brain mush stuff that
tears like fat on prime rib. Some animal from
another corner of the barren field yells to tell me
that if I sever my brain, I will lose my life, but I yell
back, “but I will feel much better.”
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My Day in Tricky Bullets I
- Empty mind, the goal, but interference.
- Dog man, dog man, listen to that shitty music, don’t listen to that shitty music, just let that shitty music float through and cause you to vibrate, dog man.
- What would guru guy think about how empty my mind is, but if I wonder that, it, the globby mind not my wonder, is filled with egotistical motives and pollution swarms, blowing circuits.
- For a moment, as smart as the five dogs, but Harry looks at me.
- Get your shit together, he says. I’m hungry and you need to quit fucking around.
- Pixie loves me, but she’s only looking for a surprise for her breakfast.
- No surprise, she toys with the others because dog food sucks.
- Gracie does not chew Pixie’s head off. I don’t know why.
- Idea for poem trickles in as I am busy feeling ashamed for not emptying the mind, feeling dizzy with the wheels of insanity trying to trick me into losing my place in the world, threatening to make me forget who or what I am, threatening to remove my sense of the calendar, threatening to incapacitate me and bend me over the edge of the sink under the rag infested with the rottenness of old kitchen mess. I am ashamed of my diseased self.
- An unbearably sweet girl on the roof downtown throwing rocks.
- Maybe 20 stories.
- Maybe pebbles, but more rock-like because they have mass, power to alter the world,
- and she throws and throws, and all the people in the streets are joyful.
- The people do not protest.
- The people strive for acquiring all of the free rocks.
- I see why my poems suck so badly when I have ideas like this, but my editor earns his pay, and he says, You quit even thinking about writing until you have a brain that might understand what art is supposed to be.
- Mozart for lunch. I did not eat Mozart.
- There are times, listening to Mozart, and I am sure I’m listening to God. I wish I could understand this.
- The odd phrase “could not be more perfect” comes to mind.
- A guy talking politics on LinkedIn the other day said it’s rude to bring in things which come to mind. I suppose it is too spontaneous for politics.
- Reduce your time with politics, news, silly strings of comments about art which somehow make you feel contentious.
- Reduce these and do something worthwhile.
- A guy talking politics on LinkedIn the other day said it’s rude to bring in things which come to mind. I suppose it is too spontaneous for politics.
- I’m a fucking toad sitting in a meeting.
- New guy. doesn’t understand. You don’t know what we know.
- Some guy says he likes Carl’s idea and I feel less like jumping out the window.
- Jumping out windows is tough on the 16th floor because the glass is very strong in order to resist those things that buildings tend to run into.
- For a short time, I reflected on the last 8 years of being a father as opposed to the years before that, and I had an immensely good feeling, a rare sense of worthiness, and I thought about the last time my daughter told me she loved me. Yesterday. Oh, there might not be better goodness, and I hope that is okay.
Inside a Flagrantly Violent Sheen
I am watching the clouds go by,
sitting, myself, not the clouds,
in a giant spaceship, and the clouds
are so relaxed, belligerently cheerful
and nonchalant. They don’t speak
but listen carefully, dragging memories
of careless days when I threw
rocks across the wasteful tar roads.
I work at reading some good stuff,
but nothing strikes me with reward, so I
concentrate and the fine but random
patterns in the caramel-dipped wood,
which is singing to me about the cause
of my loneliness, humming about my
broken spirit, asking me why I slouch
in bubbling detestation of my inability
to be good in the world, and I look up
to see that we’ve left the clouds behind
and there is only a sad lull of the blue
that wraps itself in the flagrantly
violent sheen of an evil sun.
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Back Into
It’s a brand new day, a new job.
The waterfall is brilliant, but the chatters
are annoying the hell into me,
testing my patience with humanity,
but I’ve coached myself
to be compassionate,
so I let the voices commingle
with the tumbling water.
My brain starts to hurt.
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