I recently bought a used copy of E. B. White's essays. His writings have enchanted me since I was a child. I believe he is indeed a consummate master of style; there is an economic grace to his writing that I imbibed early on in my career as a reader, and which I try, both consciously and unconsciously, to emulate in my own productions. These excepts are from the essay titled "Some Remarks on Humor."

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

I believe the same applies to literature, and probably any other art, and this is precisely why I've chosen to place my efforts into literary creation, rather than literary criticism, despite having been rigorously trained in the production of the latter.

Another tasty quote:

"Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't need to be a humorist to taste the sadness of the situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content to it. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat."

Glad to Be Here Now

I knelt there before Love

and begged her, pleaded with her

"Please, please forgive me," I said,

"I forgot about you,

and had you not come to me and reminded me of your presence,

I would still be where I was yesterday."

Love said to me,

"Get up;

get off your knees.

Sometimes, I'm a long time coming,

so during the in-between times,

you wait

and think of me;

make me up, invent my form and countenance.

Console yourself with those thoughts,

and soon enough, I will come."

"Ah," I said,

"My punishment and my gift."

Love smiled.

052305

Camus on a Wednesday Evening

« L'erreur, petite Catherine, c'est de croire qu'il faut choisir, qu'il faut faire ce qu'on veut, qu'il y a des conditions du bonheur. Ce qui compte seulement, tu vois, c'est la volonté du bonheur, une sorte d'énorme conscience toujours présente. Le reste, femmes, œuvres d'art ou succès mondains, ne sont que prétextes. Un canevas qui attend nos broderies. »

-Albert Camus, Une morte heureuse

“The error, dear Catherine, is believing that one must choose, that one must do what one desires, that there are conditions for happiness. The only thing that matters, you see, is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women, works of art, worldly success - is nothing but excuses. A canvas awaiting our embroideries.”

- Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Ready to Go

Shit

fuck

cunt

honkey

dog!

god, I love screaming

Toejam aloe shit fuck piss damn ouch your mom!

everything,

all of it,

all of this

it all makes me want to scream and laugh and have fun and kiss you and punch your fuckin lights out

you little bitches,

come run with me

without you

my poem wouldn't exist

so let's go

let's run

I'm ready


091614

You're Gonna Have to Beat It Out of Me

Okay, okay I get it

I'm talking to you, God

I see your plan for me, I get it now, okay?

I know you're going to keep me in humble circumstances

keep turning the screws

I know you're going to keep knocking me down until there's no fight left

maybe its arrogance you wish me to rid myself of

arrogance in thinking that by worrying and dwelling upon, I can change myself and the world

I can see myself as the old man you want me to become

old but wise and still alive and vital and creating

and this man, the man you want me to become, he lets almost everything go by him

he doesn't rush out to defend everything he holds dear every time someone disagrees with him

most of the time he just nods his head and says, “Maybe you're right.”

So I get it, I get it

But I still can't seem to take anything on faith

You know that

And you also know that, as such, I have to live my life the way it makes sense to me from moment to moment

Maybe it's fight, maybe it's heart, maybe it's dull arrogance, maybe it's all three;

but no matter what it is

if there's something in me that shouldn't be there

You're gonna have to beat it out of me

070514

To my sister, one of my heroes

Sometimes I feel

we were born into darkness

not the darkness of scary movies

devil worship

or moonless nights

but the darkness of people who can’t love each other

the darkness of alcoholics and racist grandparents

the darkness of people who doubt themselves so much

that they paralyze themselves,

remain frozen in a miserable stasis

for generation after generation

but not you, sis

and not me

we seek the light

071214

The eternal moment I seek now to relate

#############$>........THE FEELING OF BEING ABOUT TO GO ON A GREAT VOYAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111...%($#@%_)(#@)(

that's the only way i can think of to describe it

(fear of failure compounding everything today)

but I will not yield

no

on the contrary

I will dive in

for that

is the eternal moment i seek to convey now

however clumsily

072014

Poets Are Assholes

as concerns my writing, the way i talk to people, the way i love, whatever-

i want to hit the nail on the head, every time

i want to tell you what i see

and i want to be honest

but alas, i'm just another poet

broke, unpublished, never show any of my work to anyone

yes, it appears that i'm just another poet

and not a good one, judging by my worldly success

you see, i can’t effectively translate my feelings into words

so instead

i simply imagine a pile of my writings

a small pile, representing my life’s work

i imagine this small pile sitting in a landfill near the ocean;

a few seagulls fly by

as the pages filled with my words

are caught up in the wind and carried away

i've heard that opinions are like assholes: everybody has one;

poets are like assholes too in the sense that

no one wants to hear them

081914

Music Is Just Fine

Musicians, artists, those who do it for the love of the thing itself and how it makes them feel to be a part of it, they never have to worry.

Sharing art only hurts the greedy.

Music itself is doing just fine.

Music is sound, it is vibrating air, and it is a gift.

We ought to value and compensate the artist, and that is because people who dedicate themselves to the art produce works that make our time here easier, our collective experience more enjoyable, our sorrows more subtle, our highs more sublime. They tell us in our lowest moments that someone else has been there too, and that it was beautiful, that they're still happy to be alive, and you will be too. Even if you can't be right now.

To freely give the gift of music, the happiness and joyful rapture it can convey, to listen together and acknowledge each other as we create real meaning from within the void... that is the only law of my land.

082014

Mike and I Playing Nintendo

We played a lot of video games, Mike and I;

late-80s, classic 8-bit Nintendo games:

Metroid, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Pro Wrestling, Ikari Warriors, Contra...

I was seven or eight, he a year or two younger

he and his mom lived above the bar where she worked until close

so we had a lot of time to play video games in the morning while she slept

unfortunately, when the game didn't go his way (which happened half the time)

he got mean

he'd almost always call my mother an El Cajon Blvd whore, say that I loved my sister's dirty panocha

that sort of thing

At first, I never gave it back

I couldn't

it didn't seem worth it for a video game

but it wore on me

wore on me bad

so eventually, I calculated an insult that would really hurt him

I turned it over and over in my mind

it was one of those perfect insults

expressly crafted to hurt a specific individual

the kind of exacting insult that can only come from someone close

someone who knows your fears and struggles

and can thus pinpoint precisely where your most sensitive nerve is

and punch a whole right through your heart

so the next time I was winning, and he started up on me

I said it:

“Yeah, well, we're richer than you.”

He didn't have a response; he was silent

but his mom did;

She usually slept on the couch in the living room with us,

but since she'd never reprimanded him for saying those fucked up things to me

I'd always assumed she slept through it and never heard a word

But when I told Mike that we were richer than him

all of his insults didn't matter

and it didn't matter that my family lived three blocks away from Mike and his mom,

that the only real socio-economic difference between our families

was that my parents hadn't divorced yet

His mom, said, “Well. that's because you have two parents who work.”

I felt horrible

worse than horrible

because I was wrong, you see

Mike had been right all along

I didn't realize until years later

that Mike's mom had certainly heard him hurting me

saying things about my mom and my sister

but she did nothing

so I thought I deserved it

that I was the one who had gone too far

the one good thing I took from the experience

was that I never honed my verbal ability to hurt that people I care about

no matter what they do or say to me,

and I never will

071214

I Can Sing My Song or Not

Being stared in the face

by my dreams every day

as we all are

but awakened

and with vision coming into focus

ever more sharply, painfully

I see now that I alone can sing my song

or not


071214

Hospitality

friends have such a powerful influence over us

we experience in their presence the shock of recognition

the understanding that they too do indeed know

some of the same deep, secret, joyous places as we do

places of such sublimity 

that they far surpass our ability to describe them when we speak

but which we can nevertheless describe well enough to know

that our friends know them as intimately as we thought only we knew them

this explains why we love our friends

and the hold they have over us: 

they are a reflection of ourselves

and consequently, a confirmation of our existence

this is why our friends' hold over us is so powerful,

and this is why we sink with them when they founder

071214

Aggression

poop

balls

fuck

shit

piss

cunt

piss cunt

shit balls

balls of shit

nigger

wetback

kyke

faggot

honkey motherfucker

white boy bitch

anglo-saxon

greasy wop

big balls of shit

nigger chink gook puke

Mexican dick shit piss lumps

cocaine piss stains boiled blood jizz in the salad

pus cunt

pump a dump

shitty shit camel jockey holocaust

fuck your mother father friend concubine

you cum dumpster

I don't like your face

you dick sweat rancid moron



040714

A fear

I sometimes fear that I will get to the end of my life

maybe as a sick, sad, lonely old man

or perhaps trapped in a car wreck, bleeding out, in horrible pain

or sick with something terminal in early middle age

I don't know

but I'm worried that I'll be there

and the thought of everything I'd always wanted to do, but hadn't

comes to me, crashes onto me like a tsunami

and I die in regret

and that's my eternity

this is my fear

however

if I do have to die

I hope to die

in the midst of a beautiful thought

like the dream I sometimes have

where I see hope, courage, transcendence, and grace

as real as wolf cubs playing together in a meadow

yes, I can see them

and they quickly grow

into sturdy, majestic adults

they soon notice my presence

and devour me

I go peacefully

I even have a little smile on my face

081313

Mindless Self-Promotion

Buy my book  HERE

Please. Buy my stuff. It's quality product. I really, really don't want to have to work a day job anymore. What, neither do you? Well, fuck you. We're talking about me here.

Good lord. I wouldn't give me money, not with an attitude like that.