Drunk Talk

G. and I dragged our sloppy feet home last night, around the wee hour of 3am. A fog had blanketed the city streets, which were otherwise vacant. The homeless and wayward had hidden themselves in the nooks of buildings, the latenight rabbles had already retired for the evening.

I said, what a service this fog does for us, hiding everything, putting minds and bodies to rest. G. wouldn't have anything of this, my drunk philosophizing. And yet, I pressed on- the fog reminds us that we are connected; it is steam, a stew of water particles where we are floating chunks of meat, the trees but vegetables, the sidewalks spices.

And it morphed into poetry. This art, this life, our language is entirely utilized by metaphors. This is like that. Here is there. So, I told G. while I used my umbrella as a walking stick on the rain-laden pavement, poetry is pure existentialism. I am the grass, I am the night, I am a sewer grate, the spring flowers, cement, the metal gate. He rolled his eyes. Despite our efforts at even being direct, and despite the times when we say we are alone, or the poetry that claims to be but an island in an archipelago, we are the same. That is the magic of metaphor. It's even a mathematical equation where everything ends up as 0; a round, all-consuming numeral. Take it or leave it, it will have you.

Blacklisting

Poetic language, like any other language, is dependent upon some words, images, metaphors, etc. more than others. Such frequencies ought to be scrutinized, rethought. Why is it that we recant these? What do they mean to us and the world in which we live?

Hence, with the masses of poetry I've been consuming lately, certain words have been repeating too often. I've developed an aversion to them and approach them with the utmost caution. These words are:

Star
Moon
Sparrow
Bone
Radiant
Soul
Memory
Dream

This list will expand as time melts, surely. But, it's a beginning. The economy of words in poetry, especially short poems, must be utilized to the greatest of its abilities. And poetry, as language art, must continue to reflect not only on our world, but the form of the art itself.

Life is a joke, and I am here to tell it.

Poet Didn't Know It

The MFA program has immersed me in poetry. I'm looking at myself in the mirror as a poet, the geometry of my face, the hair-like-feathers that dangle from atop my head. My square shoulders say it. They've said it all along, but despite my big, round ears, I didn't listen. I never listen until after the second, third, fourth opinions have spoken. I am a poet.

This is a man that speaks in broken sentences. Words enjambed, pieced together like a mosaic; and sometimes they make sense. His face will line the inside cover of a book someday- I see it.