Why this site exists:
Dust does not do justice to words. While filing the last tens years of writing away into a little binder, I realized that the words hated me. They were born and suddenly abandoned. I do not even give them to friends to read anymore. All that the words witnessed, all they had to say, all their expression, stored silently under a day bed as if there had been no life ever lived. No life deserves to be buried in a little black three ring binder in box under an old bed. No life deserves that. But every life gets it. My father was a racecar driver 50 years ago. Maybe three people on this planet know that. He still carries his old NASCAR card in a worn out black wallet tucked away in his back pocket. Life shouldn’t be buried like that.
Writing is a protest to cremations and burials. Words and ink insist that things not be forgotten. The call at 8:00 a.m. saying your best friend is dead should not be forgotten. The feeling in your body as you gave out and hit the floor after that call should not be ignored. None of any of this should be ignored.
But everything is constantly replaced with ads and things we should buy and new hair styles and fads and trends and clocks and titles and paychecks and status symbols. Everything. Conformity to this is mandatory, or else…
Or else speak and write and witness. My father is 70. His life is buried away in a little black wallet and hidden under sawdust in the garage. I am 35 and exactly half his age. I will not burry me.
Nor will I wait for an audience. Nor will I wait for an editor to accept my existence.
Be your own audience. Never be edited.
Why the first person…
Much is debated against poems in the first person. Egocentric most would say. However, the majority is never necessarily right.
The third person has a tendency to lie. I cannot tell you who someone else is. I can only tell of myself, my experience. But, the poems are not written so others will know me. (Though they are in part a written reminder of who I am, since I am so predisposed to forgetting my true self.) Mainly, they are written in hopes that a reader will relate, will have been to where the poems came from, will remember that moment that sparked them.
I do not want to be known so much as I want to know that I am not alone. The poems are maps to the places I have been. Places that I have often gone to alone and frightened. They are a calling out, a desperate need to find other travelers that have been to these destinations, rest stops, valleys and peaks. I know that I am here. Writing is my way of trying to see if there is anyone else here with me. Rarely have I written anything, then once read by others, found that I was alone.
We are here.
Do not trust the third person.
June 9 2009
Opening the past now….now that the comfort of conformity to clocks and the quiet mindful words are a chocker collar too tight… Now that the heart struggles to beat forgotten forgetting disconnecting…now that you wish you had not discarded every piece of you…your gifts tossed into the trash, no pretty wrapping paper left, no birthday bows upon your head…now that all that remains is an empty plain cardboard box …now that there is only emptiness. now that you realize life is worthless if your soul is not alive…now…now…feeling for the past, for any tiny scraps that might remain of who you where when you still had your name…now…now you are trying to create a new ritual…now bringing the dead back to life…now so worn and tired and scared…now more desperate than ever…now find…find…find whatever it takes…now to find yourself again…now to live again….now….do not give up now.
June 30 2009
I didn’t even know what was broken in me. I could only make that wordless prayer where you heart pushes out in front of your chest as your eyes look up to your faint belief in heaven and your tears start falling. This is a prayer in God’s own language.