Print This PostIt was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems live?
“Hello Darkness, you smell like hot dogs.” (from my poem “Ralph Wiggum, Redacted” – part of the chapbook ) Most of my poems reside at .
The dark room was the color of closed eyelids now. Music reached in through a window deprived of its pane. With his eyes on the music, The Interviewer asked What was the last sin your poems committed?
A few of them got all dressed up in their Sunday best and presented themselves to the editors of some of the more prestigious, pretentious literary journals, who said things like “This one comes closest, but I don’t love it enough to publish it in The Hi-Falutin Review.” Such a pointless death, like the one suffered by my first car, not to mention Kenneth Patchen, who wrote “The animal I wanted couldn’t get into the world” and other lines penned, as Valery said, “by someone other than the poet to someone other than the reader.” Our prayers might be missives from someone other than us to someone other than God. Behind my beard is a face that’s different from the one my wife fell in love with years ago. Behind any given joke is the funk that made us look for laughter. If you don’t know what I mean, you’ll wake up one day knowing.
A blade of moonlight cut The Poet’s body in half. The Interview liked this. The Interviewer wondered which half wanted most to be taken. Drinks appeared at the table without explanation. I want to know, said The Interviewer, pausing to take a sip of his drink, what your poems dream about?
They sleep in hotel beds and dream of flying and then falling beneath the sound of their own breathing. They dream of the broad curves of Crazy Woman Creek Road, which I drove down once as the sky hazed over. They dream of dying but it’s like a turtle entering water, the water creasing and then smoothing itself out.
“This morning my alarm clock tried to wake me
so my feet would take me away from my dreams
to my dream job. ‘Can I borrow a feeling?’
I sang along, which made my tongue feel
brand new, took me back to my childhood home
in good ol’ Springfield USA, scrunched me back into
my ten-year-old skin, which even then didn’t fit right,
and there was Homer, Dad, in a scrubbed new SUV,
dealer decals still on the windows, the proud provider.
I hopped onto the bench seat beside him, and the car
became a spaceship as Dad and I became Kang and Kodos,
tentacled and drooling. I turned to wake Jessica to describe the dream
to her, but just then I remembered that she’d left me
and the dream fell away like Timmy O’Toole down the well.
Jessica thinks I cheated on her, but she didn’t
see me do it. She can’t prove it.
Eat my shorts, I said to the nothing that wrapped around me,
not like arms, not like a blanket, but like midnight, like a rope.
I got up to shave, but my face had been erased,
lost, probably, in the smoke-clouds at Moe’s,
where a son, like his father, gets drunk off his Duff.
I looked closer and did see a face in the mirror.
I didn’t turn into my dad. I turned into Milhouse’s dad!
¡Ay Caramba!”(from my poem “Bart Simpson, All Grown Up” – part of the chapbook )
Minutes were hours in that shut eyelid-colored room. The moon turned into the sun without apology. Music that had been reaching through the window pulled its hand away. The Interview looked less himself. Tell me, please tell me, what have your poems come here to do?
if you squint just right, and at least once a day
I realize that whatever I’ve been saying
isn’t the point at all. I spend most days listening
to other people almost making sense, and I don’t
ask them what the hell they’re talking about
because they’re on television or the radio, or
because I’m eavesdropping from the next table.
AND
You may remember me. I drove a float
in the Springfield Parade. You wore your crown,
your sash, and your gown as you waved
and blew kisses at everyone but me.
Remember? I hauled the Marshalls
and tested the microphone for the band
that played your wedding reception.
You may remember me. I wore a tiny
red, white, and blue thong to the beach,
hoping to lure me some fish.(from my poem “Troy McClure” – part of the chapbook )
