Insomnia is usually a good sign for me that I am avoiding confrontation. That I am far more asleep at the wheel spiritually than I am physically. That I need to write, or pick up the guitar, or find some song, movie, or good friend who will shake me awake. Something akin to a mental spring cleaning. But it’s never that easy. Unless you are an asshole. In which case, everything you think is the honest to goodness truth and you sabotage your illusion of control by lifting your arms in victory revealing the chinks in your armor, the bare armpit, and the arrow pierces you from the side where there is no rib cage, and all of a sudden you remember you do have a heart.

Despite its spiteful title, this is my love song to Poetry.

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poetry is for SHIT
Poetry is for shit. We climb under the covers.
Hardback, paperback, cyberback, audio
back because it’s all for shit. No one can stand
up. No one can preach from the lectern without
words to follow on the page, on the mind, so deadly
derivative, so deadly diminutive, so deadly
distilled. It must be. It must
intoxicate. It must have been fermented or how else
can we let it soak in and take us. There can be no
other reason we submit. But I, too, I have been
taken in. Bath salts and all. Cloud
billowing inside the mind and I lie here
because truth is a relative mood we pander
to soothe. To remove. It is not
absolute. It is not precognitive. It is not written
in a book or yawped by the lectern brandisher.
It is a choice.
Like the meatball sub you had for lunch or the mp3
you just scrolled down to. Today
I am just not in the mood. I cannot choose and I cannot
lose to my fucking mood. So I dig
and I dig and I dig
and why haven’t any of you said anything yet?
To unlock this searing
itch? Because, of course, it is every one’s fault
but my own
and I see now, the fault
of my logic, of my saftey net, of the cyclical things
I choose to forget. I am sick. They say.
Unwell. Unnourished. Not enough
coins dispensed to grant a wish. Just algae here. Age. Too old
now to hope for recompense but old
enough to observe, to dispense.
Like toilet paper. Like a break-time snack.
Like protection. And that is why poetry is for shit.
Because I really need it. I really, really need it.
Sugar high. A caffeinated grasp on the mechanics of
functioning, savoring, dispelling the muck of survival.
A dog ear, a photograph, a shoebox underneath your bed.
But they are not your words. They are not mine.
They are ours.