The Pieces of Me by E

If I ever had all the pieces of me, I don't have them now
I don't know where they are or who has them
Maybe I still have them, how to put them back together
Maybe someone else has them, how do I get them back

Blues, Booze, Romance, and Revolution: From the Poetry Notebooks

After my first story about a drunken gig, I got a demand from TA Demings to put some poetry up here. Not all of them are pretty, but they’re all honest. If you dig it, let me know, I always got plenty more in the notebooks.

Rainbow in June

(By Walter Beck)

Pt. I: Day (Scales Falling)

Where were my brothers?

Where was the righteous anger

I spent many nights drinking deeply of?

Where were the scarred eyes

That could blaze across a thousand headlines

At a moment’s notice?

Who were these plastic young men

Strutting around shirtless

With shaved, chiseled chests?

Swimming around

In complimentary Coors Light beads,

Weaving in and out

To a synthetic dancing rhythm.

The only glimpse of any fire

I saw

Was someone busking for donations

With complimentary gifts

To pay off their lobbyists.

I had finally made the pilgrimage;

And saw that our fathers’ house

Had been turned into a den of thieves.

Pt. II: Night (Heart of Salvation)

At the stroke of midnight

As I stood outside the gates to the Freaks’ Mass;

I saw a short, stout young man,

Shirtless

With a nipple ring

Flashing in the moonlight.

He had eyes that said

He had walked with the kings,

He had seen the mountaintops.

He had eyes that said

“Walk with me in madness.”

He had eyes that said,

“I can show you to love flesh to flesh.”

He had eyes that said…

No ID Piss Break Blues

(By Walter Beck)

There ain’t no right

To drop a deuce,

To drain the lizard,

Down in Phoenix way.

There ain’t no liberty

To take a squat,

To have a slash,

Down in Phoenix way.

There ain’t no guarantee

To piss in peace,

To take a dump without being asked

To see your papers please,

Down in Phoenix way.

The old side is still too crippled with fear

To let our people go,

Too invested in rumors of crimes

Of strange rapists and perverts,

To let our people go

Down in Phoenix way.

Our brothers are marching in the street,

Calling their reps,

And emailing their senators,

All for the right to go when you gotta go,

Down in Phoenix way.

Oh down in Phoenix way,

Pissing is still a crime

In the land of the free.

It’s Like Giving Roses for a Writer

(By Walter Beck)

Walking off the stage;

After the longest set of my career,

Forty-five minutes,

Spitting romance and revolution

To half a dozen people,

Plus the sound guy.

But it doesn’t matter;

It was new ground broken

And I still felt alive.

I ran into you

After I walked off stage,

Still high from the performance

And about a dozen beers.

You only heard part of my diatribe on stage

Because you were getting ready

For your own show;

Holy Christ, you were beautiful

To my boozy poetic eyes.

I gave you my set-list

So you could read it for yourself;

It was the closest thing

To a romantic gesture

I’ve ever really done.

No More Martyrs Blues Pt. III

(By Walter Beck)

The headlines keep screaming

“VICTORY”,

Again and again.

State fourteen rings the bells

And fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen

Seem lined up at the gate.

But the backlash is brewing.

After ten years of riding high

In the highest courts of the land,

And in main street America,

Riding the crest of public favor

And the wave is getting ready to crash.

The backlash is brewing.

It’s brewing,

Under the glare of knife points

Flashed on a digital screen.

It’s brewing,

When messages flash

Still calling for us to be locked up in camps.

It’s brewing,

When the homegrown hate

Crosses international borders.

The backlash is brewing.

It’s brewing,

While we’re falling asleep at the wheel,

While we turn our demands on autopilot,

So sure of the mountaintops we’ll see.

It’s brewing,

While we turn over our hopes and dreams

To the professionals,

To let them sort out all this mess.

The backlash is brewing,

And I still wonder

How much innocent blood must be spilled

Before our last bridge is crossed?

Last Minute (Near) Bust

Back in 2011, I was having one of my best years as a live poet; I was doing at least a gig a week, sometimes two or three, hell I did three gigs in one day back in August. Most of them were triumphs, I did my first live show out of state at Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago, I recorded a couple live albums, it was a pretty good year. But I’m not here to tell a story about my triumphs on stage.

It was December 14^th, I had finished my last final of the year and getting ready to move back home. My buddy Jimmie wanted to go out for a beer, so he came over. I suggested we call our buddy Ryan to see if he wanted to join us in a cold one.

I call Ryan and he says, “I can’t join you right now, but I’ll be out for your show tonight.”

I said, “What show? No, my show is tomorrow night, I’m booked at Coffee Grounds.”

“I thought you had a performance at Zims tonight, they said you’re performing.”

“Huh? Well I guess we’ll see you there.”

I hang up, and Jimmie looks at me sort of funny. I call the barkeep at Zims and she tells me, “Yeah, I thought we were doing the poetry thing on a weekly basis, I have you booked for 10:00.” I said OK and hung up.

So there I was, with a last minute booking, no time to really promote it or really get a good original set list together. Jimmie and I headed out to Ginny’s, one of our favorite local dives where we got a couple of power mugs, these big quart glass mugs of draft brew. I’m sitting there, pounding down this beer, flipping through notebooks and poetry books, trying to get a set together before I had to hit the stage at Zims.

After the power mugs, we went back to Jimmie’s place and I tried to get some last minute publicity drummed up. It was scheduled to be amateur night anyway, so I thought there’d at least be a few people out there to catch some of the upcoming and local drag queens, along with the notorious gonzo poet.

We went out to Zims at about 9:00; it was getting a bit nasty outside, not horrible, but cold and rainy. We walk in and it’s empty, there’s a few guys hanging out at the end of the bar, I recognize one of them, and that’s it. It’s alright, it was early, surely a few more would show up, so we ordered a pitcher of draft and hung around, I was still putting together my set list. It looked like I was the only one who showed up to perform, so it was all me that night.

10:00 rolls around and still nobody’s there. We decided to wait a bit longer, I ordered another pitcher of brew, Jimmie declined to have any more since he had to drive. At around 10:30, I said fuck it and went to do the show.

We move into the showroom, there’s me on stage, Jimmie, a couple of guys from the bar, and the sound guy. I’m up there on stage, pitcher of beer next to me, along with an ashtray, and my set list in my bag.

There were no other poets, no drag queens, just me. So I went through a forty-five minute set completely smashed, the previous beers were kicking in and the current beers were catching up. I did a couple of originals, but it was a lot of covers, I did some Ginsberg, some Bukowski naturally, and ended the set with Eric Norris’ three part piece “A Life”.

I stumbled off stage to a bit of scattered applause and Jimmie and I headed for the door. It wasn’t a total bust, the sound guy said he dug it and the other dudes in the showroom seemed to enjoy my act. It wasn’t my best performance, but I made it through and still got a good reaction from the few people there to see it.

Funny post script to that story, the next night, I did my gig at Coffee Grounds, it was a packed house, a good rowdy crowd, a forty-five minute set of originals, and one of the best performances I ever did in Terre Haute, IN.

I Feel Human Dark With Sugar.

Matt here.

The series finale is still postponed, until I have time to think it through. This week  I haven’t had that. This time when I’m sitting down to write is not that much.

I love that it’s Saturday. Yesterday a friend flew into Tokyo on a flight so late that, because I didn’t plan accordingly, we missed the last train home. We looked for a hotel but (no longer being in Tokyo and by this time thoroughly exhausted) we couldn’t find one. We ended up renting a karaoke booth for a few hours and singing until the trains started up again. We got to my apartment and went to sleep around six.

I love that I paused at the railroad crossing on my way to 7-11 to pay my electric bill and I saw the crown of Mt. Fuji nearly but not covered in smoky clouds. I’d just finished reading The Fault In Our Stars, so every pain and irritation felt far away and it has been one of those days when I feel I have extravagantly wonderfully much. Clouds. Novels. Tangerines. Poetry. Friend.

I love that my friend asked about the quotes on my mirror. The one from Joan Didion saying that “Character--the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own life--is the source from which self-respect springs” is if not my favorite the one I am most determined to apply. I blamed family and church for my unhappiness for too long, but slowly I’m making it habitual to say “I could have acted differently.”

I love that my friend let me  read to him from Human Dark With Sugar.  Feeling my tongue make the beautiful words to be heard made me hungry to live, to be human dark with sugar hot to melt the snow. If sex were like that I would not object.

---

Here is one of the poems I read to him: Why Is the Color of Snow?

Here is a website that made me smile and then recoil. Then smile again. WTF, Evolution?

Spellbound

Hey all! This is Bradley and for my Thursday post this week, I’ve decided to share a prose poem I wrote about my first boyfriend. I originally composed it for a creative writing class. I hope you like it:

Spellbound

My fascination with dyed hair began with Clint.

Hypnotic black with traces of metallic green the color of a beetle shell,

His rude outfit included scuffed converse, jeans, and a tight purple t-shirt:

It had an upside-down tree splashed across the front.

He had one ear bud in at all times, and smelled nicely of cinnamon.

I remember the night we met:

Everything and everyone smelled distinctly of chlorine from the pool outside.

About 30 people were swimming in their underwear.

All kinds of junk food littered countertops and floors.

With a “Clint, Bradley… Bradley, Clint”, we locked eyes, laughed, and he took my hand.

We sat in the crater of the gumball-green beanbag where we compared music tastes

We sampled music by sharing a pair of headphones.

As we got closer, the divot in the beanbag got deeper.

My head lay against his shoulder above a spaghetti tangle of limbs.

Clint leaned in closer and kissed me softly.

I felt a huge wall crumbling around me. There it was.

Something inside of me melted and I felt warm sticky goop wash over my soul.

Again he kissed me, and I felt suspended in midair.

An invisible puppeteer had lifted me by the spine.

As we kissed, I think I blew a fuse somewhere inside me.

He had pierced my armor and tickled my soul.

I was utterly spellbound by that choppy green hair the color of a beetle shell.