Night 111 - Fighting Through The Itching To Revise Three Poems Each Night In The Cafe

As I struggle to type these words, my neck and my chest are wailing and the itch seems to be everywhere. For the past few nights, I have been going to the Bourgeois Pig as the itching begins at night and forcing myself to sit down and revise pages of poetry I found in my storage space. I found well over a hundred pages scrawled and written and types on various pieces of paper, all loos as opposed to the fifteen odd poetry journals I have written in over the years. I often do not remember when I first wrote the poem unless there is a specific reference and the pages are all mixed-up in random order. I just go from one to the next. I try to maintain the heart of what was first written while elevating it to the next level of expression.

But even more so, it is a battle. I do everything in my power to concentrate and create as my body screams and the clothes irritate my skin and all I really is a sweet moment of relief. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. But here are the three poems scratched down tonight from the scraps:


promises of the crystal sea


the letters broke free and made it over the wall,
stumbling through dead reeds and stinging nettle,
they finally reached the edge of the cliff
where the silence of stone is celebrated.

i was abandoned for the ocean, blue and wide.
callow and callous, a starched empty shirt,
bereft without my tools, the building blocks.
the words chose a vision unspoken over obscurity.

every word ever written and still being read
sacrificed deeper wells, surrendered the sublime;
so much easier to dazzle in a cramped apartment,
the drone of the subway, libraries desolate.

am i just a city boy brewing more bad medicine?
so hard on the self, so unforgiving and damaged;
how could he sing the song of the mountain wind?
for what did he sell the promises of the crystal sea?


That is the first. I might have written it in Park City or in Manhattan in the early 1990s, and the draft was quite different, almost in the form of an aphorism. The second was written in Paris in 1994.


licks her fur


with a royal languor,
the persian licks her fur,
clean as only a cat can be.

hairless apes waste so much water,
washing away the wondrous dirt,
ignorant to the story in the earth.

barely recall what the pet looked like,
all those years ago on that velvet couch
in an expensive paris apartment.

i search today for the feline soul,
but the cat's eye infected by invention;
there is nothing to find beyond myself.


This is getting more difficult. The first draft of the last poem clearly was written in Los Angeles in about 1997. I expanded on the original jottings quite a bit and removed a touch of ethnicity.



his best customer


when the crack dealer
told me late one night
i was his best customer,
maybe, just maybe

it was time to stop.
he hides salvation
under his tongue;
sweet bitter ivory flakes.

perfect hunger answered,
in a transubstantiation
as the product is spit
into my quivering palm.

the best have dry mouths.
new boys all spittle and slobber,
the sacred reduced to sticky icky
and the eucharist wiped away.

trying to drive normal now,
pick at my nose, darting eyes,
ready to smoke away boredom,
sighs withering into ashes inside.

i never learned his name
but he always took my money.
as i drove away drowning,
he hid the silver in his jowls.



Okay, that was not easy but that it what I do to feel okay about myself as I struggle through this process and try not to go any crazier than I already am. And it makes me happy. There are valuable moments in the poetry. And there is always revision.

Sometimes I wish I could revise my life as readily as I can revise my poetry.