By John Tischer
You'd
think I could write a poem,
since
that's what I do, or, should
I
say, that's what happens.
Where
do they come from?
Haven't
been many lately.
Sometimes
they come in bunches,
like
grapes...what a delight to see
ripe
fruit on the vine!
Maybe
they come from another
dimension...maybe
they're stored
for
lifetimes 'til the right trigger
is
pulled.
I
always wrote, I never knew why,
and
I was always surprised to see,
like
when you're amazed a the
sight
in the toilet; to think that that
had
just been inside you, that ones
darkest
workings are hidden from
sight,
function secretly, automatically,
as
if part of some cosmic plan.
I've
got a question. Did we shop for
these
bodies, these particular lives?
Did
some look for the new Escalade,
while
others wanted an old jalopy they
could
refurbish and soup up? Smooth
sailing
or a project? Hard to know.
So,
yes, I can write, writing happens,
but
I wouldn't particularly call this a
poem...this
is just words, my friends,
just
words I would say to anyone...part
of
a conversation I'll never have.
I'm
spoiled by words...I make them up,
or
combine them in new ways, like
fusion
cooking.
People
like reading novels, stories...I
can't
write them, whether because of
A.D.D.,
or, just because my dogma is if
you
can't express yourself in a page,
you
really have nothing to say.
I
wrote for over forty years before I
thought
of myself as a "writer", even,
albeit,
(love that word) a mediocre one.
I'm
a poet by default because I can't do
the
other things I used to any more. Like
all
writers, I guess, I enjoy that some
people
like to read me.
Watching
Herbert Huncke and Gregory
Corso
reminisce about their beat lives,
lives
before they became known and
admired
as significant, their cheerful
faces
and twinkling knowing nods, they
seem
to enjoy adoration of young people
that
realize they wrote important truths.
They
sang at the right time, when America
was
fruitful, not fruitless, when the intellect
still
had elbow room to navigate, when joy
seemed
like a possible outcome of a new
wave
breaking on the shore.
Will
I be remembered? Will they is more
pertinent.
Will the geniuses of literature
survive
the pollution of Orwellian fabricated
minds,
survive past an era of moments of
seeming
surety?
Even
if humanity goes the way of the Dodo,
as
long as intelligence is born somewhere,
whether
on this world or another, the truth,
the
gleaming diamond of inevitable conclusion,
is
certain to arise.
