jonberger

The little girl I sometimes care for
told me about one of her lessons
in class today.
“There was a handout on poetry,”
she said.
“Oh,” I smiled, “I know a little something about poetry.”
“What?” She asked
and I said “I dunno.
“What was in the handout?”

“Some terms we should know,”
she replied,
“like stanza, and line
break,
and rhyme and –
what is meter again?”
“Dadada dadada dada?” I suggested.
“Right, but what is it?”
“The rhythm of the words, I think.
I don’t know the terms all that well.”
“Well, then,” she wondered,
“What kind of poet are you, anyway?”
“You ask the good questions,” I responded.

I’m an unlearned poet.
I’m an autodidact poet.
I’m a standup poet.
I’m an ADD poet
or a short attention span poet, or –
what?
I’m a prolific poet.
I’m a repetitive poet.
I’m a prose poet.
I’m concrete poet.
I’m a good poet.
Am I a good poet?
Am I really a poet at all
just because I call myself one?
Does it actually work that way?

I turned from my reverie
and faced the girl.
She really did ask good questions.
“You learn anything else today?”

The album I am currently listening to
is made up of recordings
from one of your favorite artists
from before you were born
but released only recently.
It isn’t bad.
I think you’d like it
if you still played LPs,
if you still listened to music.

I would play it for you,
were we still speaking.

I wish we were still speaking
and I wish you still listened to music
the way you used to.
I wish your LPs hadn’t been dispersed
between all your brothers and sisters
and one or two that I still have in my collection
and will never be rid of.
I wish you’d come here
to my lousy neighborhood
to sit on my cluttered floor
while I place the platter on the spindle
so you could explain to me
what there is to like about this album
that you never got to hear
because I’ve never really understood this guy.
He was always more your kind of groove
than mine.

I wish you could tell me
why I’m supposed to enjoy this new album
by this old guy.
Oh, it’s not bad.
I just wish you were here.

Q. What makes you dance?
What is it
that inspires you to stand
and step
and strut and stride
all over the floor
and do it some more
until there’s sweat and blood
and sick and gore?
What makes you dance?

A. I don’t want to be hurt
so I dance in splendid isolation
away from a partner
separate from a crew.
I dance alone
proud but divested from the crowd.

A. My cousin Tony dances to be seen.
He’s really good.
He looks the cock of the walk
when he goes under the flashing lights.
Everyone wants to dance with him.

A. I wish to drink of the sin
of the body
knowing flesh
and testing it
to capacity
but with little chance of hangover.
I want to taste the fire of the devil
and not get burnt.

A. When the right song comes on
at just the right time
that hit from last year
you were always singing to
with your friends
and you’re out with your friends
and one of them starts the charge
onto the dancefloor
it becomes something unstoppable
a downward boulder
and you know
some funky steps are coming.

A. When she calls you a future soulmate
and you just want to feel closer.

A. When you hope to be
the prettiest girl at the dance
but you know you lack the proper plumage
and you think,
“Maybe there’s another way,
to prove myself
special.”

A. When David Bowie tells you to.

A. All of the above.

After the apocalypse
being banned from the 23rd Street Library
won’t seem like such a big deal.

After the apocalypse
the fact that I never got around
to throwing out my old LPs
will turn out to be a good thing,
once I get my hands on
another hand-crank record player
(after the first one breaks).

After the apocalypse
all this extra weight
is gonna be a distinct advantage
over you superfit people.
You’ll be wasting away,
all the supermarkets having been previously looted
but I’ll be living off of blubber
for maybe six months.
Then I’ll be fit
and you’ll be gone.

After the apocalypse
maybe Maggie’ll like me.

After the apocalypse
and everyone on the Eastern seaboard
but me
is dead
and I wander these streets
a thinner ghost
of my former self
wondering what I should do
to while away the hours
the self-loathing poems I write
are gonna be a whole lot shorter.

Adults are awful.
Adults are, like,
the third worst kind of people out there
behind murderers
and girls who save seats
without putting anything on the seats
to let you know that they saved them
in the first place.

Adults forget.
They say things,
like, promising to talk about getting a dog
when you’re older
but when you ask later,
having no memory of the conversation
and even when they do admit to it happening,
saying maybe we can talk about it
on your birthday
which is, like,
seventeen months away!

Adults forget to pick you up on time
and they forget when they said
you could throw papers off the roof
and they forget that they swore
that grandpa wouldn’t pinch your cheeks this time,
they promise.
Adults suck.

But they’re only the third worst,
because adults aren’t always so bad.
Sometimes, they remember
your favorite flavor of ice cream
and which kind of nuts you’re allergic to,
even though the doctor can’t find any biological evidence
to support the allergy at all.
They remember which parts
of your favorite story to skip
on stormy nights and,
if the storm keeps on going,
they stay with you
to make sure that nothing bad comes in
to get you.

And when the storm is just awful
and you can almost feel monsters’ eyes
peeking through the window
and adults tell you
they have to get to their own bed
to get some sleep
or they just won’t be good to anyone
at work in the morning
and after five minutes
you’ll just have to cope on your own,
sometimes,
adults forget to go.

The brownstone down the block is gone.
It’s just gone.
Last time I looked
it was an abandoned structure,
sure,
but now it’s gone.
Totally gone
– probably irrevocably so.

How’d I miss it?
I’m home a lot.
Mightn’t I have heard such demolition,
just next door?
Maybe my hearing aid
needs a new battery.
My upstairs neighbor always says
I wouldn’t notice my head if it were cut off, which is a pretty strange thing to say. Why didn’t she tell me
about the building being abolished?

Now that I think about it
where has my neighbor been lately?

The worlds change every day
in sometimes imperceptible ways
but this
this shouldn’t be one of them.
A part of my neighborhood
has been eradicated on my watch
but I wasn’t watching.
What will become of us?

I hope it’s a Talbot’s moving in.

Do not start this conversation now
here
with so little quiet
and so many witnesses.
There is very little chance
the conversation will be controlled
just as you hope.

What you ask is incendiary
and I have been ready to explode
for some time, myself.
The conditions are perfect
for a firestorm.
Be careful
lest you set it off.

I’ve been waiting for this,
really,
been hoping for the chance
to give myself over
to the rage and heat and destruction
that has been circling us both
for some time.
I don’t think
I can stay cool for much longer.

So really,
I’d like to amend my initial statement.
Ask me what you want
here and now.
I am fully prepared to answer any and all questions
you may have,
however uncomfortable.

It is time,
I think, for things
to get hot under the collar.

You didn’t ask
but still I believe
I will offer my insight
regarding the state of your situation
and what you can do
to fix your frigging life.

Know your history.
Know the ins and outs of your family
and all those who came before you.
Understand your legacies
and any myths your people may have.
Keep in mind all that came before you:
legends and roadmaps
and songs and stories.
It may prove useful someday.

First there was the leech
then there was no leech
and then there was.
This may make little sense to you
right now
but give it a moment.
It may prove revelatory.

Try to walk away
from your own incessant idiocy
and live a life in blissful ignorance
of the ignorant bullshit
that your stupidity produces,
making you so particularly loathsome.

Learn how to bike.

You’re welcome.

Hey, condescending guy:
You.
Yes, you!
How many other guys around here
do you think are quite so condescending as you?
Well, trust me,
if you do think about it,
I’m sure you’ll find that in terms of talking down,
you’re the leader of the pack.
You are King Peacock of Condescension,
so, for that,
I guess, congratulations.

And also
don’t do it.
Don’t be so judgy.
Don’t act so superior.
It’s not like you’re this paragon of perfection yourself,
condescending guy.
Your horse ain’t quite that high.

Just
put a pin in it
and be a little better
to your fellow man
– and woman
(I don’t want you questioning my feminism here.
You’d take any excuse to ad hominem my suggestions,
wouldn’t you?
God…).
You could also be better to animals.
Sometimes
they just can’t hold it in.
Kids, too.

Not everyone clenches their butts
quite as tightly
as you
do.

Please cut it out
or cut it down.
Cut some slack
for those you share the world with.
You may not like everything they do
– or even everything you do –
but we’ve all gotta get along together
or we’ll all fall down.

So
don’t be so condescending, huh?
Be less critical.

You fucking coward.
When you had a chance
to beard the cage of the lion,
the home of the very enemy
you claimed for yourself
long enough ago
that its name had become your mantra,
you opted to dodge it.
You called in sick.
You had a chance to fight your self-proclaimed nemesis
and instead, you asked it to dance.

Way to go,
you yellow-livered,
lily-bellied waste of words.
You could have laid claim to something brave.
You could have earned your worth.
You could have tried to fix that
which you claimed to hate
but rather,
you opted to become part of the problem.

At least though,
there is freedom in what you’ve done.
Now,
no one around you ever need consider
taking you seriously again.
Any time you lay claim to something of steel
we shall know of the rubber beneath it.
It’ll make life easier, surely,
for us.

For you
things will only get worse.