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~

Back when I was born, the poet
could write about the times like a
photograph of Lewis and Clark hitchhiking on an
old dirt road. There was really something
lurking under those pretty neighborhoods and
pretty slums. They found the perfect
world was finally sitting right there in
their coat pockets. That was nineteen fifty
two. I didn't know what I was
missing.

Eleven years.

Feared Communists. Loved Rock 'n' Roll.
Johnson swore in, but I thought he was
ugly, so I didn't like him, I
never did. My teachers were always saying
that I was going to be an artist.
I never really understood what the whole
"going to be" thing was all about,
but I knew I wanted to sell paintings.
Ironically, I remember loving van Gogh.

*

Back in nineteen seventy four, the poet
could find licence in any café, kiosk,
fingerprint or trash bin, like shopping
in a clock store but never knowing
what time you should leave. Somehow over the
years, I'd become another hep sexy beatnik rock
star caught in his own sense of fashion. I
wanted Bowie and Jagger to suck me
dry when I got there, because I was going
to be famous. I could feel it.

Eleven years.

Still alive. Still waiting for Orwell.
Time had turned into waking up and smoke
breaks. I'd become slightly known by
saying things like, "I never assume a comb-over
is intentional. I just imagine it happened
to fall that way when it dried." Unfortunately,
free literary magazines didn't go far when I
needed to eat, drink, smoke, or move my
ass from point R to point T. So,
I worked from here to there; from place to
place. I was what I used to
dream of being. I was the starving
artist.

*

Back in nineteen ninety six, the poet
had finally succumbed to fake proclamation
like a horizon disappearing behind so much well-
shaped concrete vomit. I still wrote a little;
when I didn't feel like my pal
Bukowski stuck in a mailbox full of one
thousand charmless women simultaneously explaining
each and every detail of their equally charmless day.
Age was certainly catching up to me, exactly
how I used to say it never would.

Eleven years.

The world is still changing, and I don't have
much time left to go. I think about
what happened to that sexy rock poet,
and of all his dead heroes who are in the
ground now poisoning the
flowers. I no longer care where my
name ends up on the all-time greatest's list.
I think about when I die, and how my life
is supposed to flash before me. I can't
imagine how it could ever flash before me any
faster than it already has.