Enter Taoist Rehab: Creative Writing

So, If you've been following my blog for the last couple weeks, then you're probably sooooo excited about Taoist philosophy that one more post on the subject matter might make you overdose. Believe me I can totally relate;) I just start reading the Tao Te Ching and next thing I know I'm standing outside Barnes and Noble, after operating hours, in the middle of winter, with a venti coffee I mixed with redbull and crushed up Ritalin, scratching my neck fiendishly as I re-read chapters 1-45, and wonder where half my body weight went. It happens, I seen'd it with me own eyes. Believe me, whatever disgruntle employees open the store in the morning won't have any sympathy for whatever sob stories about existential crises you may have, I've tried them all.

You don't want that, and neither do I. So instead of overdosing you on Taoism, I'm gonna post poems I wrote. That and if Desi Mcmanus, my friend and manager, doesn't see any creative content on my blog, he's gonna drop kick me in the face. He told me so, and he'll do it, especially if the Bills loose any more games this season, and Jameson's Irish Whiskey is involved. So to avoid that whole mess, I will do this for all the readers, and Desi!!! (How's it feel Desi? Yeah we're doing this for you, we pulled the damn existential car over!!! You Happy now!...lol JK You're my man!)

Warning: Most of these are older like first two years of college, some are about drugs, some are a little sadder. But I think they're cool;)

Broken Capillaries

When I snorted heroin the floors
of Crystal’s apartment were smeared with ash
that spoke in Sanskrit. This is where
small town sonnets are written.

The walls yellow and broken
with holes we punched in them,
resembled the face of the moon
when it shoots up behind clouds.

We’d drive down a highway that cut Buffalo
across the forehead with a switchblade .
The streets orange with factory lights,

sidewalks dug out of blackened snow.
On the West side houses didn’t stare
into the streets.

If they did they'd see
my friend’s capillaries
were bomb shelters.

They usedneedles
to write the saddest prose
I’ve ever read.

Those days, when I looked in the mirror,
my face was an obituary column typed into the night.


Calligraphy of Nerves

Here dawn is a pen,
cutting the floor into light
and dark with Rinzai ink.
I am a puzzle
of things I can never let go.

I haven’t died yet.
Watch me

unreel like a canister of film,
and knit the sky with a constellation.
The problem is
there’s no one brave enough.

Don’t ever think
you understand me.

I’m strong enough
to be fragile
as I swing
in a noose of nerves.

(side note on this last one: I submitted this to a class workshop, and it just so happened that a well known writer whose name was Franz Wright, (I believe that's his name, I mix him up with his father who was also a poet) sat in on the class, and he jotted down one of the lines in a little notebook he carried with him....I was psyched!!!)

Reminder

You would never chase me when you got angry, your face
smoky olive, but eyes bright like windows to a forest fire.

Those were the times I learned to dig forgiveness out of my heart
like a mine. I’d run to my room, and block the door

with a chair, sit in the corner and listen to your footsteps
grow louder like thunder as it draws near.

Reveal to me my deepest fears as the hinges hold
onto the wall like this door is my only friend.

As you lift me over head with one hand and throw me at the floor,
remind me that I am not a man.

Sideshow

In East Aurora lamp posts are milestones.
In the darkness you can use them
to measure the distance between parks
when we travel through sidewalks.

On our way to Warren park
the tatters in our jeans prove
this town writes a story on you.

The train tracks change their chapters
when we reach them.

From the rails the night sky is a museum.
I view the stars without the framing
of tree limbs and power lines.

They know more than I.
They view us
in this corral of brick roads

and houses stood still in time.
We break bottles
of malt liquor in the streets,

with corcidrin eyes
lying on our faces,

waiting to get swallowed by Warren Park.
To run through her swing sets drunk,
daring to get knocked over.

We don’t have a purpose
but to entertain the stars.


Snap

Today took everything I had.
My crashed computer on the desk,
a wine glass in pieces on the floor,
and I lost the poem I wrote about you.

The cell phone in my pocket is busted,
I wonder if you called last night,
because today I woke up in a room
that was not my own,
and I remember what happened for once.

I gazed into my mirror for hours,
found my reflection,
and I looked it in the eye.

I found the human in me
tied by the throat
to a tree with deep roots.

It was running away so hard
it could have snapped its own neck

Hidden

The dawn light through a barred window
cuts my eyes open like tin cans.
At 5 am they toss my cell,

throwing my thin slice of mattress
off the steel bed. They dismantle my room
like a poor argument.

My most forbidden quality rests in
the pen cartridge taped to a plastic fork
on my desk. It keeps me human.

They want to take that more than anything,
so I learn to hide it. They can never hear
me through my ventilation shaft,

my voice is contraband.
I exercise in secret
behind the showers, while the COs
read the comic strip.

But in the visiting room I am stripped
till they can look up my asshole.
Nothing can be hidden.
I wasn’t even allowed to touch my family.

But my Father snuck in something
I hadn’t seen. On his last visit
a tear fell on the left side of his nose

and disappeared
behind the mystery of the divider.


That's all for now folks! I have many more poems but I don't want you to overdose on my creative writing either, cuz then what will I do to break up the philosophy? I'm really like a glorified one-trick pony, I have a couple tricks that I variate and just hope that different people see different tricks at the right time;)

Any ways, hope you all are enjoying the blog, please send me any criticism you can!!! And tune in next time!!!