Why am I so stupid?


I don't know why I am so stupid (if I did, I would have titled this "Why I am so stupid").

Here are some stupid things I have done. I don't know why I do or did any of them:

I check books out from my university's library and then wait until they are late to renew them. Even though I can renew them online, or by phone. I don't know why I do this. I also have at least 25 books on my bookshelf right now that I need to read. So dumb. So dumb. So dumb.

I ride my bike as fast as I can and then become upset when I feel tired later. I stay up until four in the morning and then get pissed off when I sleep in late.

I submit my poems to journals knowing they will not be published. Fuuuuuuuck

 

This is a series of four line poems, some of which are maybe even connected! Haha, no, I am incapable of narrative in poetry. I wrote these in the span of fifteen minutes. [And then I edited them for about a week, they're better now.] I am not proud of that, writing quickly is almost always a sign of dementia or extreme emotial duress/stress. As you will see, this is the subject of my poem. Enjoy.

(Something is wrong) is something wrong?
Honey, I live alone now, come live well enough alone with me.
What’s wrong with planning our life out?
(This ended all so suddenly.)

Please please, please
Don’t shut that door.
Oh you asked me,
“What’s poetry for?”

It keeps you here, I hope,
Writing quatrains in quatro
minutos, hoping they’ll tie you down
like so many chains and ropes.

They come when you're leaving
and deciding that that writhing
creature on the floor is no longer
worthy of your attention anymore.

Oh desirous but not desired,
The smoke in my eyes came from your fire.
(That burns on what? Unrequited love?)
You're not Jewish yet you look it and it wasn't your heart but you took
it!

But how, I wanted you close (in that closet).
At that pretend bat mitzvah
they lifted me on the chair,
And took my heart as a deposit.

But it was worth it,
I’ll tell you that much.
If anything, they didn’t take enough.
(Love is the spiritual crutch).

See, it’s nice to feel things,
Hear things and
Nice to do things, mean things
and see things through to the end

but it hurts to pretend things,
Dream things, sleep away things,
But I’ve always loved to pretend.
(Some said it’d be my end.)

But why not pretend?
When you’re across the country, a-leaving me,
You’re really sitting a-nexting to me,
(Oh, how lucky can one guy be?)

(I kissed you and you kissed back.
Who cares about those things called "facts"?)

Again

Betting on reincarnation,
coming back again.
Promise next time I
won't talk like that again.
Easier than it sounds
but I forget
our bodies stick around.
(you might find me living underground!)


It won't be me, you see,
talking to you again.
Probably better this
way, no not again.
And you'll be someone else, too,
but just how
will I find you?
(I'll forget this old life and make it new!)

(Dubious at Best) Italian Sonnet

My girl is a better poet than me,
If you saw her naked you might not agree.
I have much more to be worried about,
All the more reason to whimper and shout:
The curve of my spine and a bended ring
finger (of my despair it signs and brings
imagined stares now that I have told you,
I call attention to myself, it's true.)

But I have the soul of a salad bowl.
Of a decade's toil, she took the toll,
I'm sorry honey, you grew up so hard
but look now look we have made it this far.
Come back with me it will be so easy
please and please and please and and please please me.

This is what all my poetry is for,
Oh honey, I live waiting at your door.

sigh-fucking-sigh

This was written a few weeks ago: 

So I've been awake for 37 hours. This is all because my Internet, which is usually as slow and excruciating as constipation*, has been running unusually fast. Last night, I didn't really do anything at all, anything that I remember anyway, but I did submit poems to two different "magazines". One of them is a normal, non-institutional journal. The other is my (admittedly-inherenetly-sucky) university's gallery magazine.

In doing this, I realized that I have a slight problem: I don't understand any modern poetry. Not any of it, not a single word. Off the top of my head, Gregory Corso's "Marriage" is the most recently-published poem that I understand, and I understand it completely. 

It was published sometime in the late fifties/early sixties and is really a great poem. I like it more than most anything I've ever read. In fact, I could have written it. This is not to say that I'm an excellent poem-writer**, though. It means that I (feel that I) understand the poem so deeply that it could have been my own personal experience that went into the poem. My "girlfriend" is also a phenomenal, better-than-me poet.

And it is my personal experience, almost. "Marriage" is (almost) the way I feel about marriage. I feel like this is all very obvious. Anyway:

Now, I can read poems in a journal and understand them, but my understanding is almost exactly the same: Okay, postmodernism, okay, okay, okay. Because, what the fuck, poems don't look like poems anymore! 

Yes, it's kind of dumb to argue that poems have to look like poems, but none of the poems I'm seeing in journals rhyme. 

* This is the shittiest simile I've ever written.

**This does say, though, that I am reluctant to call myself a "poet". Add that to my list of theoretically-correct self-descriptive adjectives that I shy away from.

So I see that Blogger has a new interface. I am impressed.

Enjoy your spring break,
Miscellaneous drinkers.
Don't run me over.

Don't forget sunblock,
I don't like melanoma,
it doesn't suit you.

Let's go to the beach,
follow the naked people,
this was your idea.

Are we running out
of time money gasoline?
Lottery ticket.