Just a few days ago I saw a car on the side of the road. My wife recognized it as a car that had run up on my bumper and passed me with a delightful zeal about a week before. I remember the primordial and terribly delicious sense of schadenfreude rise up in my chest before being squashed by my civilized sense of mercy and pity. Is that poetry? Or is it merely the stuff that must be molded into poetry? Is poetry something we do, or something that is done to us?
Yesterday I sat on the porch swing and sipped whiskey until my head spun like a rusty merry-go-round, grinding and screeching its slow circuitous route. All thoughts melted away, and Descartes' famous maxim, "I think, therefore I am," became obliterated with the clankings of chipped ice against an empty glass. My body reverberated with pure and solemn existence, and it reinforced my ardent belief that my best ideas come from no thoughts at all. Is that poetry? Is poetry something we think, or something that thinks for us?
This afternoon I passed some boys playing basketball in the street, and I was transported to a care free time when the biggest worry was getting home in time for supper. I remembered the time I jumped over a creek and felt the universal thrill and ecstasy that only comes from doing the uncharted and unexplored. The tingling of the skin and emotional compression of the bone that only comes from taking risks. Is that poetry? Is poetry something we feel, or a thing that forces us to feel?
Is this poetry?
Monday, March 26, 2007
Connotation
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Dissection
During the summers I would visit my uncle.
He would always drink Budweisers from the can
And walk around his front yard
In a pair of old shorts and wifebeaters
Stained with sweat, motor oil and
The aforementioned beer.
He was perversely comic.
Once, he held two frogs in his hand
And said to me,
“How can you tell if a frog’s a boy or a girl?”
I said, quite truthfully, that I did not know.
Upon that response, he turned both frogs over
And laughed, in his drunken way,
With a glory that Prometheus would have
Been proud to share.
I could see in his eyes
How he reveled in his self-proclaimed genius,
Thinking that his proclamation had changed
My whole perspective on life
And shattered everything I believed in.
Once he asked, “If a tree falls in the woods,
Does it make a sound?”
With such hushed reverence
It was clear he felt he deserved a Nobel
Prize for asking the question.
I wanted to say, "If a fat old man
Hell bent on drinking his life away
In his front yard said something
Incredibly stupid just to impress a child,
Does he make a sound?"
But being young, I held my tongue.
I think he’s dead now.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Off With His Head?
Recently a jury urged that a judge sentence a man to death for the killing of a child. You can read the story here, if you're interested. Being MSNBC.com, it just glosses over the facts, but apparently the guy buried a 9 year old girl alive in some trash bags. I don't know why the age is important- would it be less heinous if he had killed a 15 year old that way? I doubt it.
I'm not a fan of the death penalty, simply because humans tend to make mistakes. And even if they're right 99% of the time, that means 1% of the people on death row are innocent. Which is, in my opinion, a special kind of suck.
I'm not familiar with the details of the case (I don't really care, either) but I do know that a jury has an emotional, gut-reaction type response to these type of trials. There's no "innocent until proven guilty" mentality. There's only a, "Somebody's gotta pay for this shit" mob thing goin' on that can't be good. I mean, you know the State's gonna bring charges against someone, just to avoid public outcries. So they pick the most likely suspect, and send him down the river. The jury would convict anyone, if the prosecutor has any talent at all.
Also, life in prison has to suck infinitely worse. It might be bearable for a few years, but once you realize you're goin' to die in that hellhole, it's gotta suck pretty hard. And then you got the other guys either a) trying to fuck you, b) trying to shank you, d) trying to give you Hepatitis C and/or AIDS, or d) all of the above. It can't be good times. Especially if they know you killed a child.
Even the cruelest son of a bitch in prison won't stand for that shit. There's guys in there who will rob a bank and shoot five cops in the face without thinking about it, but they go apeshit when they learn about someone hurting a child. A few years ago, didn't some inmates hold a guy down and put a prison tattoo on the guy's face? Oh yeah, they did. You know the guard was paying attention that day. Wink. Wink.
Also, the death penalty is painless. You just go to sleep. Hell, I can go to sleep. That doesn't take any balls. They don't even really fry people anymore, do they? Just a little shot to make you sleepy. Jerk Wads.
All I'm saying is, there are fates worse than death. One of them is spending fourty years in a maximum security prison before dying with a painful Hepatitis C related infection and the nickname "Easy Rider."
I'm not saying the guy isn't the scum of the earth, only that he's getting off easy by being put out of his misery.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Kids Are Weak These Days
Earlier today I rescued a turtle from the middle of the road, simply because that's how I roll, bitches. It was a big one, maybe tipping the scales at three to four pounds. He was feisty, too, and kept trying to rip my fingers off with his needle claws.
I took him home and then rode my bike to a nearby creek to drop him off. I'm no turtleologist, but I figured he'd like some water.
There was a kid standing next to a bike. He was maybe eight or nine. He asked me if I could get his tennis balls for him, and I said, "Sure, as soon as I release this turtle." It was a very Napoleon Dynamite type moment. I think to myself it's pretty sad that this kid's playing tennis by himself in the middle of the street, but then I determine he probably just doesn't have any friends. It's still sad, but I like to supply my depressing thoughts with a logical explanation.
So I release my captured turtle into the creek, and it simply sinks like a stone. "That's not good," I thought to myself, especially since this kid's watching my every move. I really don't want to be the one to break it to him that stuff dies. "See that turtle there, Timmy?", I'd say, pointing towards the murky water, "That's what happened to your grandpa. Turns out he's not just asleep."
So we stare at the water for a while, me and this kid I've never met, and pretty much watch nothing for a few minutes. It was very Faulkneresque, and it kind of gave me the chills.
After wigging myself out due to the fact that a) I'd just killed a turtle, and b) I'd probably severely scarred some little boy for life, I climbed out of the creek.
Then I go to get his tennis balls. I'm thinking they're in some kind of heavy brush, because the kid was probably Barry Bonding them into God knows where. So I ask, "Where are they?" He walks to the edge of the road and says, "There. I didn't want to get stung by the bee."
The tennis balls are like literally half a foot off the pavement. The grass is maybe two inches tall. This is ridiculous. Someone should get this kid some therapy, if he's that scared of one bee. Also, the bee was flying around us the whole time- did he think that the bee was going to get super pissed if he moved six inches to the left? I'm pretty sure all bees think are, "Buzz, buzz, fly, buzz, danger, buzz, buzz." I don't think tennis balls and vendettas are really part of their bag of tricks.
In my day, we were jumping off shit, scuffing our knees, swimming in ponds, getting cut up to hell and back in briar bushes, tempting tetanus on a daily basis, borrowing machetes to hack our way through the woods, building clubhouses, and playing with slingshots that could quite easily put your life (much less your eye) out. Sure half of my childhood friends died in freak accidents, but that doesn't change the fact that today's kids are soft. We need a major foreign power to attack us, so this younger generation is forced to man up and grow a pair.
P.S. The turtle lived. Apparently they can hold their breath for a really, really long time.
