I Don't Think I Write Sad Poems

So here's a new version of an idea I've tried to write a few times. It's a bit exaggerated but I don't think it's tragic. More the general lack of perspective of youth and something I can chuckle at a little. The last two versions of this poem kind of bummed Valerie out so here goes...

Free Lunch

Under the prison bright tubes of cafeteria florescent,
you enter the lunch line, always with a buddy
because this is elementary and loneliness is solved by clumping,
and it welcomes you, the exploding mush smell of peas,
of chicken nuggets, of tater tots, burnt edges of lasagna
something called Mexican Pizza, even the dreaded Fish Day,
maybe a sliver of perfume from the large ladiness of the workers
as they ice cream scoop everything but ice cream
into little apartments on your tray and gosh, you hope
that some sad sap isn’t a kid to one of these ladies
and she brings home this tripe for dinner, too;
as you grab a carton of milk, (always chocolate, unless you’re weird)
and now are at the cash register, your reckoning place,
the thing you dread more than cursive, times tables, or
the suddenness of the girls’ puberty erupting on their chests,
because you are poor because your mom is single because
life is that way sometimes and the state is now stepping in
as Daddy and picking up some of the slack by giving
you free lunches at school and all you have to say most days
is “Your Name” and they’ll check the list,
the magic list of poor kids, that you dread
will end up read aloud like a note passed in class
and on the best days, the register lady will know your pleading
face and just imperceptibly nod at you, an “I gotcha” look
because this such a trust fall, and you’ve piled excuses, in case
your friends noticed no money and you’ll always say,
“The kids of school employees get free lunches” or
“I have a tab” which is an outdated term but still
on the periphery of language and works until a friend asks for a tab
but the worst, the worst, worst days are when your buddy
is telling you a joke or the plot to a comic book and
the register lady cuts in to say, “$1.45” without recognition because she’s new
and you have to say, “Your Name” and then even worse,
“I’m on the List” which is like pinning on a Star of David
made from Nascar Stickers and Bail Money
and her giant, sweaty finger moves down the page with a world’s slowness
while the other kids pile and look over shoulders to see
what’s the holdup and a neon sign descends saying, “POOR, POOR, POOR!”
as she utters, “Your Name, One Free Lunch” to your retreating back
because you’re going to sit in the bathroom and do your times tables
on your napkin, figuring out how much lemonade you’ll need
to sell all summer to pay for every single lunch in 5th grade.

Dirty Thirty

I had my 30th birthday party on Saturday and it was glorious. Valerie's party theme was my "Favorite Things" and so everything from food to entertainment was favs. She had out fancy cheeses and bread because I love those. Cheddar and Sour Cream chips, spicy hummus, a heaping mound of cookie dough, sour worms and all kinds of stuff that I love and will someday die from.

She also had things like Empire Strikes Back playing in mute on the TV and my favorite music playing throughout the apartment. We had a raffle of my favorite novel and my favorite candy bars.But...my friend Aaron brought an item inspired by my love of cheese and a dream I had. I dreamed once that I had saved Brad Pitt by employing an umbrella made of cheese. Aaron brought over a forty pound block of cheddar to carve into an umbrella. But when I saw this massive thing, I knew that within the confines of its structure was a glorious cheese boombox. Which Aaron not only provided the cheese for but also sculpting tools.

The rest of the night was spent carving this glorious monster into a beautiful relic that tasted delicious on crackers. Here are some pictures.Here we separate the speakers. We also carve out a D battery compartment in the back and a place for the cheese plug.
We decided this wasn't no CD playing cheese boombox. Double cassette tapes!

Here's the almost finished product with working tuner and volume knobs. And some treble and bass faders.
Do you wish you had one? Yes. And where is it now? In bags labeled "Right Speaker" "Left Speaker", "Left Tape Deck", "Right Tape Deck". And soon to be on nachos. And then there will be a cheese boombox in all of us.

This Took Way Too Long

So sometimes I just get stuck. I wrote about 95 percent of this poem about 7 days ago and I've been trying to write an ending for it ever since. And so in the meantime, I kept tweaking it, cutting and changing the body of it. I really should have saved multiple drafts of this but I just finally settled on this sort of first draft. Ending? Hmm. Not sure yet. I don't want it to get too expository and I don't want it to be a list of things either. But I also don't know if copping to what is going on too early is taking some of the punch out.

Hmm. I really missed workshops this week. In a way, it's taken me a little while to settle down after workshops and get back to writing what I want. So I'm glad to be done in a way. But there's the little nitpicky questions that you can't bother people with outside of a workshop. But here's this and I have a few others to post. I just wanted to get this one out first. Unfortunately, some of the spacing doesn't translate into blogs.

Because I Couldn’t Yoke Your Memory to Me

The day we left that duplex,
I kifed the address off the mailbox
so people would doubt the house.
I began this for you,
for not rescuing you, to turn the earth backwards.
And when I pedaled by the next hundred afternoons,
I’d throw a handful of salt into every square of yard.
Until the grass and grow made exit, until I saw vanishing
possible and all the next two decades I erased.
Somethings gradual, like termites, like drowning the spring
come worms and then their children, and then every cousin-
great-grandchild of every worm we knew
when you and I summered here.
So forth with birds, so forth with squirrels-
and still more for you.
When I had a car, I arsened that rotten estate.
When I had a bulldozer, I pushed its bones into the open
basement and scraped the ground flat as a Kansas plain.
I chopped up the driveway, rolled back the avenue,
evicted the neighbors and chased them all, wee wee wee, into new homes.
Then I slow poisoned the water table until the town
got up like offended party guests.
So emptied, a Vesuvius of silence
our childhood cicadas were revealed
so them, too I squelched in their dreams.
I’ve hidden you
from this blanked burial ground, our blind city.
I peeled away all highways, rerouted to towns of our lesser memories,
blurred the atlases and records, arranged the hills unrecognizable,
stoned myself that these means justify this ending:
one day, you, by some fate, wander back
and stop to wonder at some ghost of sadness,
but (if I was thorough enough)
your eyes would register nothing of our old home,
perhaps you might wonder for a time if this place
ever happened to you.
For that reprieve, I’d destroy anything beautiful.

"A Taste of Things to Come"

I'm not saying that I'm trying to do a poem everyday because then I'll jinx myself. So I'm just saying I'm trying to write something frequently. But in exciting news, I just received another acceptance letter from South Carolina Review for my poem "Delivery". So now I need to write more stuff before I get it all published.

Later EDIT: I realized I had left out a sarcastic comment I had originally attached to that last sentence and Valerie pointed out that without it, I sound like a real jerk. So here is the truth to that statement. If I keep publishing, which is awesome, I will eventually run out of good poems and have a hard drive full of garbage. So my greatest incentive right now is to not run out of poems I'm proud of and want to get published.

Also, after thinking about this poem all day, I"m probably going to hack this one up into two, maybe three poems.

Tastes

His house was a fridge of beer, bbq, and ketchup,
the family sized jug of Tabasco set like a vase through every dinner.
We didn’t understand Marlboro had seared his tongue into a steak
little more than a speech muscle.
So there were two kinds of food to us –
Mom food, sufficient in itself
and Dad food, a meal made for salting or dipping.
One breakfast on an “every other weekend”,
we tasted spoiled milk. When we told him,
he gave it a chug from the carton. It was fine, all in our heads.
What a divorce cliché to cry through a meal at Dad’s,
but we hiccupped through every sour spoonful.
And we loved going out though it meant a bar
that served Mexican food hot enough for him to taste.
We never suspected dinner beers like he never thought
of second hand smoke. It was another way things were
and we didn’t stop to ask how life was wrong.
Even on the drive home when he’d crunch a curb
or drive us superfast like there were no cops on earth
we’d look out the limited glass of his Pontiac,
see all our stars and say that we have two cities
when most kids have one. Which made us the lucky,
and not the broken. And how must he have thought,
pushing concentration through the cloud of hops,
that maybe these weren’t his kids, just a friend’s,
and he’d drop them off, head back to the bar,
where he could be loved, not divorced but rather new.

My Return to Poems

Thanks for all the encouragement about recent stuff. Things are looking up and I'm happy with the new work I'm producing. Jon Peter's show is getting some good press like it was featured in TV Guide and that means maybe money would come out of it eventually? Who knows? But I've been writing some new poetry, same themes generally, but that doesn't bother me. I'm just excited how it's turning out. Here's the first new thing I've written.

Burials

In the midst of our family shakeup, I began to bury,
to time capsule the year of eleven.

I would drag old toys, an unwound cassette,

cellophaned birthday cards, my first and broken fishing rod—

to junk fill our paddleboat and glide out to the lilypads.

And like some addled scavenger, I’d swim my treasure down

deep into the sift, the shift ground grave of the murk.

The real trick to it was not to rile the lake floor

with impatience, kicks, expulsive breathing

or it’d smoke you in, eclipse your escape.

Because you needed calm to stare down the anomie,

to reach your hand down as far as you could,

the swirl of unglued clay, disintegrating beers,

through the guts of earth, past the skeletons of leaves,

fish eggs forgotten and looking for a berth,

and chittering, unscienced things.

And when I just about couldn’t leave,

when the muck hands clasped at my throat,

I’d spin and rise, the thing of me I’d brought

dropping and me, back, back to the air I needed.