Sixteenth Entry

So here I go again on my own, sorry about the complete lack of updating, but as you might have guessed, I only update when I have a poem to produce, and I hit a bit of a dry spell. Some writers believe in writer's block, I do not, which means I often just write bad poems. I feel it is better than not writing at all, at least you're keeping your chops fresh. But life overtook me for a little bit and I wasn't even writing bad poems. I'm in Philly right now with my friend Elizabeth, and in two days I'll be back in Brooklyn. The day after that I will be going back to Dallas for the first time in almost a year, by far my farthest away from with home without even visiting. That was a particularly chewy sentence. Elizabeth has several vintage typewriters which always inspire me to write something, so there I went.

Here's my poem:

LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN

When I was watching daytime court TV, i could hear gray rain
tapping the window's shoulder. Looked in the depths of my jean
pocket, dark like a denim cave, where scummy yet erudite prisoners
hold out till the law forgets and goes back to their second floor
halfway houses with their semi-estranged families, hands red and raw
from baking endless parades of mirthless breadcrusts, sunny
and unpleasantly warm, prisoners in striped pajamas, licking
their nicotine stains on their banana-yellow fingers, wringing
sweat out of their once-blue bandannas. The tall one with
the reddish beard starts inventing adjectives to pass the time,
frabgenuous, jocumential, rendulent, and locuknojical.

The prisoners start imagining an allegorical novel about
American sailors left ashore at a nameless port in China,
who walk from Hainan through Laos, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal
and Bhutan. Among the many valuable lessons they learn
in these foriegn lands is that you can die all too easily from disease
so brush early and often and that, for Americans, they know little
of the world and it's various forms of little regarded traditional music.
One of the sailors, who mysteriously died in the Algerian badlands
years later, wrote a science fiction novel that I am currently
formatting into a screenplay, and I would like very much to use
Walter Carlos's SWITCHED ON BACH for the soundtrack but that's really
not my call. The screenplay is titled Lady Be Good after the flying fortress
crew that got lost after their bombing run (for reasons historians are still
unable to deduce) and crashed in the Northwestern Sahara,
going blind from sand blown sdaistically in their eyes before dying painfully
and one by one from starvation and/or exposure. This title is admittedly
TANGENTIAL, but I and several other more respected artists say
that the accidental is just as valid as the pre-programmed. Ask
my mother for an explanation, and she will likely in grand and pleasant
detail tell you that I was born prematurely, and that my birth was
"the best thing that ever happened" to her, although I
have seen no documented proof of this.