Only in the Worst Way

So, I have a friend... maybe more of an aquaintance at this point... who is in a band. A fairly popular band - Motion City Soundtrack. Sometimes I listen to their records. Though not as much as I used to as my tastes have moved into a more progressive and heavy direction - Isis, Rosetta, Neurosis, Cult of Luna, etc. And when I listen to MCS I find that my man, Justin Pierre, seems to have captured my memories of that near year in 1994-95 and has spun them into emotionally powerful tales set to a pop-punk beat that often brings a tear to my eye and sets me strolling down memory lane.

This usually results in some rather terrible poetry. But at least it gets me thinking about my thoughts - how meta is that? - and putting those thoughts down on paper. Something I've not done enough of since paying a whole shitload of money to refine my craft. Money wasted? Probably. Maybe not. Who knows? Who cares? Good experiences, or something. Grad school didn't teach me to be brave, though, which is something I think the poet must be. Brave and willing to work hard at the craft - revising and revising and revising - never my strong suit. Instead I dash it out and it's over and done.

It used to be the norm to puke out three or four poems a day. Now it's three or four a year. I wonder how much age has to do with it?

So, poetry Tuesday today.

Nelson Hall - 1994-95

Someone once asked me

How can you love me if you don't love yourself?

The question's rattled around my head for years

and years. I've never found a satisfactory

answer. Is this really all we are?

I'm still trying to determine, at

39, who I am and if I give a shit at all.

Most times ambivalence abounds - 

the wrapper that is me - the bag of flesh

around a consciousness

that doesn't understand how to empathize,

but empathizes so much it cannot

see its own emotions are valid and

need release, need validation.

A psychobabble bubble expanding against

the walls of my skull. Threaten to burst, 

then pull back and leave the empty feeling again.

Looking back now, she just wanted a convenient

excuse to get away with a clean break.

But the truth lies there.

At the heart of it, something in those words

must feel true or why do they still prick

after twenty years have accumulated over them?

And how is it that I can remember her eye color

and the small gold stud she wore in her nose

but can't remember her name? 

Did I love her? Fuck, I don't know. I don't know much

from that time - I was just fucked out of my head

as was everyone around me - like the sixties

wrapped in flannel and torn denim, life in a madhouse,

the beer can, Nelson hall - bastion of future rock stars

business majors, burn outs, and wasted lives.

Nine months crossing boarders from 1994 to 95,

a gestation period. When you're 18 each moment seems

an eternity. When your mind is eaten away with chemicals

they seem longer.

I can remember, kind of, nights alone with the northern

winter dark out my window - glass crazed with frost - screaming

in the concrete bunker of that dorm, trying to feel

something real - the disconnection with the world out that

door so complete

I wouldn't talk to anyone for weeks, paranoid

and watching the world melt around me.

It's only in this dark near-winter mornings when

these memories flood back, these strange emotions

that I couldn't process then and can't connect

to anything real now.

I can feel with each year the razor edge of confusion,

of passion, of everything that used to make life both

painful and wonderful and mysterious, slowly dull. Like a TV

on the brink, colors all fading to sepia monotone,

a rerun of a rerun, Mr. Ed and My Three Sons, canned laugh

tracks and over-worn plot lines. Do I really have

another twenty, thirty, forty years of this? A continual

reduction of stimulus, of impulse, of making all

the same mistakes time and again trying to get them right?