05-15-2014, 01:25 AM
You're using your skills unwisely,
said the man that taught creative writing,
you show signs of confusion regarding punctuation
and the line breaks in your poetry make no sense.
A lot of what you write makes little sense to me,
I must say.
His eyes were the color of snow-bells,
so they appealed to me
since when I was a kid I would color snowmen blue in coloring books.
His eyes reminded me of things I felt affection for so I trusted him
even though I couldn't believe what he was telling me.
He was basically saying that I was writing incorrectly,
though I was writing exactly how and what I wanted to write.
I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and getting what I needed out of it:
It didn't matter to me if what I was doing was wrong.
I was writing, not conducting brain surgery,
not exactly.
The line breaks in your poetry . . .
he didn't say, Your line breaks. The line breaks
in my poems don't make sense.
Well who am I to insist that my poems have my line breaks?
What kind of sense would that even make?
The hair on his head was fair;
not like the dark hair that sprouts all over my body
and makes my shoulders and stomach sweat like a scrotum
and has me relating more to black guys and Jews than the white American
the straight brown hair on my head marks me as.
I should know better, then, than to curl my words
like greasy, slinky pubic hair
from one thick row of words to the next.
I should have what it is to know better.
But I don't know better,
I don't feel it's any better to do better
like that.
He had long fingers, with no fat paunches of hair
under the wrinkly middle joints.
When I was a kid, my dad said I had artist hands
because my fingers weren't very long.
And other kids said it was only because my knuckles were so bony
that I won so many fights,
I might as well be wielding a weapon, my hard, bony fists.
But writers don't write with fists or blood,
I'm told.
Writers write with writing.
There's some kind of catch to that, but I don't know what it is.
His handwriting where he said all these things about me looked like
he had a machine in his brain that did his writing for him.
I don't write like a machine.
As a man, I write like a man that knows what he's doing
and doesn't care that he's supposed to know how he's doing.
Like Cornel West says, I write like a mammal born between urine and feces.
I have an air conditioner stuck in the window,
and when I see the brown paper Hardee's bag I set out there through the blinds
I jump, thinking it's somebody out there watching me.
When I write, nobody's watching me,
and when people read what I write, they're seeing what I want them to see.
There's nothing wise or unwise about it.
said the man that taught creative writing,
you show signs of confusion regarding punctuation
and the line breaks in your poetry make no sense.
A lot of what you write makes little sense to me,
I must say.
His eyes were the color of snow-bells,
so they appealed to me
since when I was a kid I would color snowmen blue in coloring books.
His eyes reminded me of things I felt affection for so I trusted him
even though I couldn't believe what he was telling me.
He was basically saying that I was writing incorrectly,
though I was writing exactly how and what I wanted to write.
I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and getting what I needed out of it:
It didn't matter to me if what I was doing was wrong.
I was writing, not conducting brain surgery,
not exactly.
The line breaks in your poetry . . .
he didn't say, Your line breaks. The line breaks
in my poems don't make sense.
Well who am I to insist that my poems have my line breaks?
What kind of sense would that even make?
The hair on his head was fair;
not like the dark hair that sprouts all over my body
and makes my shoulders and stomach sweat like a scrotum
and has me relating more to black guys and Jews than the white American
the straight brown hair on my head marks me as.
I should know better, then, than to curl my words
like greasy, slinky pubic hair
from one thick row of words to the next.
I should have what it is to know better.
But I don't know better,
I don't feel it's any better to do better
like that.
He had long fingers, with no fat paunches of hair
under the wrinkly middle joints.
When I was a kid, my dad said I had artist hands
because my fingers weren't very long.
And other kids said it was only because my knuckles were so bony
that I won so many fights,
I might as well be wielding a weapon, my hard, bony fists.
But writers don't write with fists or blood,
I'm told.
Writers write with writing.
There's some kind of catch to that, but I don't know what it is.
His handwriting where he said all these things about me looked like
he had a machine in his brain that did his writing for him.
I don't write like a machine.
As a man, I write like a man that knows what he's doing
and doesn't care that he's supposed to know how he's doing.
Like Cornel West says, I write like a mammal born between urine and feces.
I have an air conditioner stuck in the window,
and when I see the brown paper Hardee's bag I set out there through the blinds
I jump, thinking it's somebody out there watching me.
When I write, nobody's watching me,
and when people read what I write, they're seeing what I want them to see.
There's nothing wise or unwise about it.
