Thursday, February 19, 2009

if every fool held a bauble, fuel would be dear


writing in the morning with tobacco & a cup of coffee is good, but it's not great. it's better to write in the night, with the night spirits guiding you. i write best after i've had a couple of lorazepams and several glasses of either chianti or german wine. heinekens help too, and maybe a tall glass of strong drink, like rum and coke or wild turkey.

anyway, the above mentioned concoctions i consider my muses. hemingway said he never wrote drunk, but for me it seems best this way... too much consciousness has always been the bane of my verse(s). it's better to write w/o thinking too much. in other words, semi-consciousness is the way. or one way. it's best to go back and forth. that way you have two minds instead of just one. both of which speak to each other.

bourbon and coke

out of the hustling hours and
into the ripe delicious languor
of my room i collapse upon
my couch, in a perfume of
frankincense and huddled
between these sumptuously
gasping walls, obscene flowers
of pinkish light spout from a
tiny lamp... the air is bathed
in damp indolence as the
voice of the city washes over
me its vague drooling waves
of purple thought... to which
i am wholly indifferent, and
wholly drunk, having come
here again, away from all the
dire pleasure beasts... away
from my hatreds, fears &
daily agonies, i fall deep into
the warmth of this solitude...
where deities mostly
dance, and night spirits open
unto me
the rare doors of perfect bliss


See ~ Underground Voices April '09

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

morning revision...




Here's the cleaned up version of whatever it was (?) I posted last night...

I started late at the literature game. I never read any fiction until I was about 22. And I didn't begin writing until I was 25. And I didn't take my writing seriously until several years after that. I graduated from Florida State with a Business Marketing degree. I majored in business because I wasn't interested in anything else & and it seemed like an easy enough degree to slide my way through. One of my mistakes was that I listened to what my parents said: "You need to have a degree... even if you don't plan on using it, you'll always have something to fall back on." It seemed like good advice at the time, but of course I didn't know myself back then. If I did I would've been more skeptical about my guidance counselors, and especially about my dad when he said "there's no money in an English degree!" He was right of course, but money's a fool's game when it takes the place of what truly interests you. And if I had lived by that "maxim" (e.g. fifteen yrs. ago) I wouldn't be thinking about this one now:

"You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived." ~ Gertrude Stein

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Sandwich Board



i was talking to my mom today, and she told me she had this great idea for me. she said some guy wrote some songs about the economy & a few other current events and received a huge response when he put his garble on you tube... she said i should do the same thing with my poetry/writing.

"people would probably love it," she said, "especially when they see your goodlooking face...etc., etc..."(a face only a mother could love???)
"it doesn't sound like a bad idea," i said. "the only thing is, it sounds like a lot of shameless selfpromotion, which i hate."
"well everything's about shameless selfpromotion these days... you have to put yourself out there... get people to notice you... that's the only way you'll ever make any $$..."
"mom," i said. "if i was in it for the money, i would've gone out long ago and bought a sandwich board and stood out in traffic on biscayne blvd to promote my 'works.' trust me...art for money's sake = art beshitting itself, every time."

anyway, that's what I'm up against where my family is concerned. my dad's always wanted me to be the next Mickey Spillane (who once wrote a novel in what two days i'm told?), and my brother's first question when i told him i have some stuff being published in some pretty good mags pretty soon was how much
(did you
pay
them?)

"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends." ~ M. Spillane

here's (1) poem...

Don't Call Me Frisco

See: Underground Voices ~ April '09