practice

By the time I kissed someone I liked, I was good at it. Pillows, posters of Peter Frampton, record albums with David Cassidy on their covers don’t kiss back, but you can press your lips against them with force or gentleness. You can make your mouth a powerhouse. Kiss your forearm, though, and you can imagine the give of another’s lips. Practice that. Kissing feels as good as being kissed. This is both.

This week, Rob Brezsny’s spiritual advice to those born under the sign of ADD (Libra, if you didn’t know) is to embrace quality over quantity. Sometimes—with the exception of having babies and infections—quality emerges from quantity.

Practice.

Practice isn’t a devil. It’s what separates the good from the great. I don’t need to prove anything, don't write about studies and such, but if I did, I would point to a particular book about what separates world-class performers from everybody else.

To become a better musician—whether you have natural talent or not—you work at it, and that means finding the time to practice. And practicing means doing. You play. You repeat the same song over and over until your wife or daughter or mother or dog wants to strangle you with your guitar strap or whack you on the head with the microphone.

If you’re a photographer, you take more pictures. You pose your dog, your daughter. You fidget with the lighting, her hair, his one floppy ear, the backdrop. You take the same picture 47 times until it’s exactly the picture you saw before you began.

Why do doctors practice medicine? Why do lawyers practice law?

If you’re a writer like I am, you write more: a story, a letter, a poem, sentences. You edit the words. You massage them. You fuck with them until they are sore and tired and smoking beside you on the bed.

On April 1st, because it was the start of National Poetry Month, I started practicing poetry again. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought like a poet for any length of time. I write nonfiction and advertising—in both my day work and my freelance life. The first can be poetic, but it doesn’t teach economy. The second is economical, but it’s rarely poetic.

Poems are not stories with random or even planned line breaks. They aren’t born like babies (though they are sometimes emotionally painful)—all perfect, if a little wet and icky. They would need more than to be cleaned up: chiseled, sculpted, molded, rearranged, cut, dissected, tortured. Even my happiest poems need to ache a little.

For the last ten days, I’ve written about a poem a day. I share them on Facebook but not publicly, in case there’s a chance I can torture them into a publishing opportunity. But it’s not, as some have surmised, about quantity. It’s about practice and discipline and the hard work of thinking in precise, power-packed words. They’re like astronaut food. They’re like the little sponges before they take on water and become bathtub dinosaurs.

The words I use in poems need to combine to form a drug. You need to blister a little while you read it. The last line should give you some euphoria. Or some despair. I want you to wonder when the next one will arrive. No, to crave it.

We don’t need to be the best at what we do. But we should always want to be better at doing it.

I never did kiss the real Peter Frampton or the real David Cassidy. I’m still practicing, but I think I’m ready.



- - - - -

("Kissback Bob" CD manipulation by Steve Parke)

the poet

On Sunday, I had breakfast with a poet. A real poet. He didn't have breakfast with me because he'd had some "Irish soda bread" at home on his horse farm before our late morning meeting.

Real poets have Irish soda bread on their kitchen counters on their horse farms.

Last time I met the poet in this place, I helped him set up a Facebook page. Now, his canonical status updates read like a taunt.

In this order: Up at five but it felt like four. Iced hooves. Thought about meditation. Thought better. Remembered Ackerman (Come to Bed Jack), her eyes. Listened to Mundy, Garbage, R. Head. Reread Paul Hostovsky's "A Little in Love a Lot" for the twentieth time. Found something I'd missed.

My update: Beer is fucking delicious. Beer is like crack. Fucking crack.

Nearly every poem he writes punches me in the gut. Across the table, the poet tosses me three pages. On the first is a poem about shooting a raccoon and putting up Christmas decorations. It is so perfect that I need to find a quiet place to both punish and forgive myself.

Sometimes I punch back. And sometimes, the poet flinches. Last week, I sent him two new pieces—one the lushest, most violent, aching, throbbing poem. He sent them back from South Bumfuck. In an envelope. With stamps. Like only poets and poetry-loving husbands do. I ran to the mailbox each day like a puppy, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I begged him to send his comments by email so I could set my poem free.

That day, the longhand-edited pieced arrived—with an entirely different critique. He told me on the better page: "This one is a great poem." It’s covered in cursive and printing, three different colors and weights of ink: a fine-point black pen; a medium-point black pen; and a cyan marker, which is his commentary.

In one week, the poet will turn 50. He'll go out to dinner with his wife. They'll talk about horses and poetry and wine. When it's my turn, six months from now, I will scratch 50 until it bleeds. And I will drink the delicious crack of Resurrection. I will wake up the next day and be exactly the same, but I will pretend that it made all the difference in the world.

The list of things to do between now and the next rotation around the sun grows: publish another book of poems (the first one's due out in May), form a band that plays originals and wholly original covers, travel somewhere by myself, go to Barcelona to see the mosaics.

The poet has lived in Barcelona and describes standing in Picasso’s house like only a poet can describe it.

And because I, too, am a poet, I am, in that moment, there.

once more to the attic

For the past couple of years, I've been writing what I call the Facebook Poems. I ask, as a status update, for my friends to submit words, and each supplies one until I cut the thread. I like to keep it rule-less, but I have to remind people to keep the words simple. The goal is not merely for me to write a poem; it's for people to like poetry; somehow, if they have invested a word in it, they are more interested in watching it come to life. To some extent, I think they are surprised by how beautiful a poem can be—intelligible, too, and enjoyable.

Still, I get oddball words—words even I have to look up, words that sound icky, like my least favorite of all words, refrigerator. It troubles me to use "forthwith" in a poem because no one says forthwith in daily conversation. Banana is hard, too, especially for a serious poem. Bananas are insanely funny.

I got this set of words a few weeks ago, and I've been stifled. But I was determined to end this year with a new poem. And it brings me to my goal for the new year. I am hoping to write the rest of my Facebook Poems and send the complete book off to a publisher or an agent or something. I'm tired of my poems languishing while my blog flourishes.

Of course, my goal for last year was to get into a recording studio with a few of our best songs, and that never happened. So I'ma make it happen, hear me? This year.

Best wishes to you out there in space and time. I hope to see you again—always better in real space and real time, but I'll take what I can get. Without further ado, the words and then the poem.

humble (kim g), loquacious (tamelyn f), gold (beth mvb), lost (julie h), wicker (jane t), caress (sarah b), strength (gail d), fervent (lynne f), quixotic (sandra r), forthwith (jason d), magenta (randy s), rime (sarah m), phoenix (julie f), warmth (beth s), parchment (michele d), scumble (craig h), lactation (jamie c), banana (mindi s), banal (peggy b), serenade (patrick p)

once more to the attic
for Bruce Ansley and Cleopatra

in the golden space between house and tree
—now magenta, now indigo—
in that space of fiery fervent sky,
I swim, lost in the bleeding striations of sunset.
In the attic, with its wicker chairs, old floors, and new heat
that squeak and hiss and settle, loquacious
as an eager child, I test my strength:
if I climb, I live, though it sounds banal.

in the rimed space between house and tree,
we bury the dog in a caress of old blankets,
pacified momentarily by the gesture of warmth,
like an infant suckling water for lactose,
a serenade of rush-hour crows poking holes
in the blurry scumble of greys above us.
we are raw as parchment’s deckle edge,
small humble mourners trembling.

in the quixotic space between house and tree
the scent of banana bread wafts outside, licks the bleak air
and, forthwith, shoots embers to the heavens.
like a phoenix, and once more to the attic I climb, I live.

words love to be loved

with thanks to David Bowie. and spring.

fall's fabric

fall's fabric

the fabric of fall
is a narrow gleaming strip
between bloom and detritus,
at once fresh and frayed.
autumn is weaver,
seamstress, singer.
she is the glee
and the lament.
birds and squirrels
scavenge the yard
for scraps we’ve sewn—
swinging tube of seeds,
bucket of black walnuts,
worms plugged into moist ground.
these are the days
of luscious comforts,
down and cider, fire,
the crow’s song sung
to the tune of radiator hum,
rhythm tapped by knitting needles.
I have worried all the buttons
on this shrunken, ill-fitting year,
and its first good breath
is a last colorful gasp
with flaming maple leaf confetti.
adieu, adieu,
remember me,
it calls as the last bright remnants
are stitched into the waning light.
I will.
I will.

fortune teller

Lest you think I'm playing countless rounds of Bejewelled Blitz and neglecting my writerly duties, I thought I'd make a quick appearance as sort of a placeholder while I wait for inspiration.

Recently on Facebook, I asked my friends, in a cryptic status message, for ten words. That is, I said something like, "Drop and give me ten." I got more than ten—some delicious, some nasty, some fun, and many difficult, multi-syllabic conversation stoppers: girdle, fleshy, concrete, sinuous, indolent, fender, milksop, tendril, coagulate, mellifluous, profligate, and vicissitude. I supplied the last two words, tea and misfortune. Here's the poem.

fortune teller

the psychic healer on the corner hitches her girdle
above the fleshy thigh part, spills a hidden wad of bills
to the concrete, then looks at us as she bends, a parade
of sinuous attendant parts folding and unfolding,
a slow dance with the indolent haze of day.
we like to stop our bikes there, feign attention to a fender
while we spy on the Reverend Sister Faye and her milksop
brother, with his mouthful of bobby pins for Faye’s tendrils
which he molds and coagulates against her bare shoulder,
and we can’t tell if the mellifluous calls from cars
are for the Sister or for him, prophet or profligate.
He claps at us to move along, as if the vicissitudes
of tarot and tea leaves were on us,
as if anyone's misfortune needed to be told.

crOw

O, a long winter
watching the crows
ballet dancers
on the wind

O, out the window
only place she goes
carried safely
on their wings

but they won’t share their secrets
shred all the evidence
they won’t grant her wishes

O, e minor
the only one who knows
how a girl
can get so old

subtly and swiftly
swallowing the medicine
waiting for a second wind

to blow-ow ow
wOe-o-O

O, do you recognize her
the woman you once knew
holing up
beneath her skin

And will she recognize you
wearing different wings
will she
pull you in?

narcotic ritual
tuned to the barking crows
drowning without waving

Cro-o-ow
Wo-o-ow
Cro-o-ow

the chairs

I used to push and pull them
with cheery clang and jangle
send them to each other
as violent as a tango
or as gentle as a glissade
and draw the fur of dogs,
pull the dust of shedding sunlight,
from piles around their ankles.


















I am with the soot in a heap,
my back thrown into spasm
by the motion of my broom.
I glower at their fancy footwork
curlicues of black steel
that swept me off my feet once
and tease me now under the table
partnered up and ready to dance.



















I am suspicious of them all—
not just these pretties casting
perfect shadows in morning light.
But every chair—wing and parson,
rocker, stool and throne, the straight
and curved, the soft and hard—
all are suspect now.
A chair should be trusted.


















A chair like a lover should know
exactly how to hold you.