One Day It Hits You

[jack_babalon]

I wanted to redo this poem from yesterday. I kept going back to it and rereading it over and over last night. Kafka vague and Bukowski argot aside, something was bugging me about it. I don't mind writting crap, but writting something that's "Crap" compared to my other "Crap" just annoys me. There's just some shit I won't stand. So I plucked it off the page, strapped it down in a chair, gave it a few quick kicks to the balls and with a scalpel and blowtorch of the mind, I got to work and made it TALK.

One Day It Hits You

One day it hits you
The horrible truth
That the devil really lurks
in the kingdom of the details
and you can see Hell
on a pretty day
shining back at you
in the surface of
a pushpin,
Along the maps of continents
made out of chipped paint
spread across the wall,
In the lonely wait
of a penny to be
picked up off the floor,
A million tiny flower facts
blossom and grow
and spread across the gulf
of what we know
and what we think we know

And it hits you
Like a shot in the mood
Like a shipwreck survivor
Something cold has settled
across your
...oh I don't know let's
call it a "Soul"...
and you've got yourself
a bad connection
on some kind of collect call

And you don’t have
The strength for it anymore
You can’t do it
You can’t
...set the alarm
get out of bed
shave off the stubble
flush the toliet
Open the mail
take out the trash
turn off the TV
wash the dishes
answer the phone
look out window
or in the mirror....
Sabotaged in a deep place
What would you have seen anyway?


And none of it
Seems to belong
To any of us
And yet the
Signature sits
On the portrait
Of the world
We have painted
With expectation
And experience
And we can see that
It is in fact our name
On the devils contract
Signed on the dotted line

………………………………..x



Thank you for your patience.

Comments

[littlesebastien.livejournal.com]

you need to come hang out sometime

pffft

[(Anonymous)]

Hiya...whats up?

-L ;)

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

"A million tiny flower facts
blossom and grow
and spread across the gulf
of what we know
and what we think we know"

that's my favorite part...

Much appreciated...

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the feedback.
I still wanna go back to it and rework it again. I seem to do this thing in poetry where I drift in and out of rhyme and it creates to me a kind of uneveness in the work that distracts from the "harmony" (for lack of a better word) of the piece. That's why I usually do prose or stream of consciousness typing-I can be flowery without the discipline.
But to be honest, while it frustrates me, it's also where 90% of the fun of doing poetry.
blah,blah,blah....sorry didn't mean to prattle on.

Re: Much appreciated...

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

i usually write rhyme scheme-y stuff that bears more than a passing resemblence to song lyrics, but sometimes i throw it all out and go prose.

y'know, even in casual conversation, you'll sometimes end up accidentally rhyming your words, so... well... i have no idea if that was supposed to make sense.

My pose of prose

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

Yeah I can dig that.
We've all slipped into the rhyme with no reasons in sight. Kinda what you were saying about casual conversation is how I end up rhyming in the poetry and stuff, I won't catch it until i'm giving it a cursory glance back over- then I gotta decide if I wanna keep it or rephrase it. Most of my stuff starts with a phrase or an image and I try to flesh it out or fill it in.