Poem 222

The perils of being a homeowner …

… like the last poem this comes from the box marked 1987 when (I can see now) I was on top of what I was doing, successfully riding the poetry horse, able to express myself fluently in word and image … the more important question being each time I sat down to a poem what to use this hard won superpower for – to express what? … of course I didn’t necessarily see it like that at the time but was perhaps dimly aware that I was at fighting weight with no sign of a shot at the title …

… I believed (perhaps still do) that I had chosen to pursue poetry through all these thousands of hours because it was the most difficult form of writing to do … so from the start it was a grudge match – if I could master this I could write anything …

… and I was right … it was just that wood and trees were becoming increasingly indistinguishable and other things were breaking into my poetic monastic cell such as theatre playwriting possibility of tv work and probability of family … my ability and achievement in retrospect I see as ironically the initial sign of an ending …

Year In Review

It was a year of shit you said
   a year of standing in doorways
watching rain staple the sky
to the sea
                  trying to make decisions
    while your mind Huck Finned it
    down the river
it was a year of hot little rooms
of throwing yourself headfirst at people
a year of missing
                                 of letters that lay
   in the typewriter for weeks
with no work done it was the year
that nothing happened that everything was put off
until this year
                         the year the pipes backed up
    in a lurid horror film titled
    Tree Root Invasion
the drains producing neoclassic columns
of something looking suspiciously like
a year of shit