What a joke it all is, except for the poetry.
I have zero fear of being hard to understand.
I understand me fine, and that’s good enough.
It’s the ones who think they understand it all that scare me most. I get away from them. They are the ones who think it’s nice when a company calls its employees family. They are the ones who smile instead of speak the truth. They are the ones who don’t want to hear what the poet has to say. The poet is used to being misunderstood.
I am sincerely hard to understand but they make things hard on purpose. The difficulty of the mask. The itchiness of pleasantries.
More than one editor I’ve worked with has told me I have two voices I write with: one is darkly poetic (translation: hard to understand) and the other is witty and engaging. They say I have to pick one but here’s the thing: you can’t really choose. They both exist and one won’t shut the other up. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry but I’m every voice that feeds the one that slides out of me like a tongue at any given moment.
You don’t get to choose [all of] what you are. Some find my voice(s) fascinating. Sometimes, that someone is me. Just remember that nothing is forever. Remember that it is okay to change.
It’s neither here nor there. The thing is: I’d written a bunch of poetry and some people don’t like how dark I get. I surmise it’s not the dark that scares them, it’s the depth (everybody knows it gets darker down there; even the sea creatures, even the stars).
It makes me uneasy to stay so close to safety, routine, rules, parameters. There is a place where danger is part of it, part of the nature of life and the unavoidable gamble of living. Maybe it’s this time of year—the way it grows stiff and naked, cold and alive, right up through your sternum. Maybe it’s the dream I have repeatedly where I don’t join in with the crowd. They want me to sing but all I can think is: I’m not obligated to open my mouth for anyone.
In the dream, I am applying eyeliner black and thick as coal.
I don’t understand why they can’t understand the crowd is suffocating me. Why can’t they hear that all of our singing is drowning us out.
It’s 2015. The tattoo takes eight hours. It’s a giant guardian angel wing, it looks like it broke free of a Gothic statue. The artist looks like a monster in his profile photo; he’s a tough guy, deeply hilarious, and kind. It feels intimate and raw to undergo the pain without faking pleasantries over the stupidity of the news of the day (it’s 2015 but you already know).
The needle stings as it pulses in and out of my bare skin. The wing is an attempt to make myself believe I can feel my mom’s love even though she’d been dead a long time by then. Even though I was still as uncertain of our relationship as I was when she was living.
A year later I will get another tattoo. That one will take six hours. It will be a long feather pen to symbolize my dedication to the words, to the poetry, to being misunderstood. I will drink gin and take cigarette breaks in the cold December air, flicking the cherry in silence behind the broken down warehouse, gravel scratching underneath my boots. I will not see sobriety coming. Not by a long shot.
I scroll through Substack Notes and feel annoyed, bored, and disappointed. I recognize this manufactured mix and I’d rather leave it in the dust. I’m weary of ‘support’ and ‘community’ which you should really never admit to the support or the community but I’m not saying it to you, I’m saying it to ‘them.’ I’m wary of strangers who would judge me for this and other things. I’m selfish sometimes, moody, and otherwise disinclined to be the person I believe I am expected to be. I hate how sobriety is stuffed into a category; I hate how it’s made to be worn like some kind of ‘lifestyle.’ I don’t mind talking to strangers. I mind their expectations, which I may or may not be inventing in my own head. Still, to me, they exist.
I’ve had it with the lengthy essays. I’ll also probably write one again soon because that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? No sooner do we declare ourselves one way than we take off in exactly the other. I’ve been overthinking everything lately and here’s what I’ve decided: we are all fumbling and we are all triumphing at varying levels and intervals all the time. Most of it doesn’t matter that much, and the more we force ourselves to believe it does the worse at life we become.
You cannot beat love out of you.
You cannot hold up your own generosity of spirit at gunpoint.
Just let yourself be the voices that you are. All of them. No one is only one thing. Not ever.
I write for you on Tuesdays, usually, but it’s Monday and the house is quiet. The coffee is hot and black and I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore.
Years ago, I’d written a bunch of poetry. Every other goddamned thing felt like a joke.
The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art
Dayum. Soul sister. Fvckin A fist pump
“I hate how sobriety is stuffed into a category; I hate how it’s made to be worn like some kind of ‘lifestyle.’”
Indeed. That’s why I can’t bring myself to apply the adjective “sober” to myself. Doing so feels like labelling myself as completely out of control before, when the only thing that really changed was that I stopped making alcoholic beverages part of my daily routine. I didn’t completely change my state of being or overall lifestyle; I just stopped drinking.