Beyond

[rowens]

I think the problem you have understanding is that you like poetry and read and write poetry. I don't know about the kinds of lives you live. Some of the poems I've made, like this one, are dithyrambic shouts to those people here where I am that let the countryside be destroyed in favor of large parking lots for factories, and mini malls that no one can afford to open stores in, while they're watching tv and playing video games and playing online. The kids around here are never seen playing outside. And you'll go to bed with a beautiful forest across the road from your house, and wake up with a bunch of plowing vehicles and stumps and trucks parked there: just as sudden as that.---What I mean to say is that writing poems and enjoying nature and the spirit immanent in such things here is like putting on blackface and singing old blues songs in front of a town full of gangsta rappers. And there are towns like this all over America. There are the Conservative Christian types, but then there's the redneck or the gangsta thug or dark metal or punk type people that are into styles and fads, but nothing much else but being high and pissed off all the time; and all of them I talk to tell me the same thing: money corrupts, but there's nothing else to do, so what the fuck. So there are no bookstores, mangled fields and forests, malls and shopping centres full of empty stores and empty parking lot space, and a big Mecca called SuperWalmart where everyone in town goes at least once a week. Our libraries are in such decay that you have to pay to rent books. We don't have record stores either. So there's nothing to do but go to work, get drunk and high, watch tv, and feel bitter. And when all your friends become drug addicts and spend all their time lying on couches in houses where their dealers live, and the only time they come to you is when they're asking for a hundred, two hundred dollars or so, the "pale skinned vampires" isn't a metaphor.---It might not be what a poem should be, it's a blues song, to ecstatically sing through the frustration and loss. It's part of a series that I plan to put together with other poems, some that are finished some that aren't, that puts it in a more suitable context. But I put it here to see how well it lives or falls on its own. Among you, real readers of poetry.

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Love and spirit are intense multilayered things. I love someone, I love my friends, my family, I love the spirit of the countryside. But rearrange the landscape, rearrange the chemicals in the body, evolve new ways of perceiving the world and society: and love, persona, spirit, poetry; all becomes less efficient, and who am I to want to burden the hardcore money-makers, strung out drug addicts, and low wage factory workers with my childish enthusiasm over what to do on the fall equinox or how I feel less loved when a woman tells me she's only giving head to other guys so she can afford drugs and it's nothing personal?---So I have to live my time, and write poems about text messages and beyond (and by beyond I don't mean this poem). So this is a fighting through poem. To express the merging, and that experience of merging in and of itself.