In order to avoid sleeping on park benches, I applied for a space in a halfway house. When I got hauled to the ghetto BTT, my intake person was all about me getting housed. Calls here and there eventually resulted in a space.
I tested hot for THC, the only drug (other than tobacco) I’d done in months. A piss test was enough to get me a bed. And that’s where my novel started getting typed from what I’d free-written in marble notebooks for months. There were the bare bones of the first three chapters in those notebooks and my evenings (after my mandatory AA meeting) was spent typing away on my laptop, hotspotting off my phone to keep me wired for research.
Actually, it was you who demanded that I write my novel.
We’d just made love on an open sleeping bag, our cushion bared
over pine needles and beneath the dubious shade of an old lodge pole pine. In
our post-coital glow, you asked about my nights after the kids were abed. You
got the bare bones of a story I was working on, the character sketches I was
writing. “Holy fuck, dude, you have to write this story,” you roared as you
slapped my sunburned chest.
It wasn’t until I was watching the old woman that I started
putting all my ideas together into a narrative whole, skipping out to the patio
to smoke and feverishly write in my marble composition books (three, one for
each chapter I’d conceived). With time on my hands after the last AA meeting, I
started transcribing then revising my scribbles into Word.
One of my fellow inmates mentioned that there was a writer’s
group on Meetup, that I might want to run my stuff by them, see what other
writers thought of my work. My first time, I brought poetry.
These stones don’t sing out
here no more.
don’t get sung no more
so there’s
just nothin’
but a sound
that don’t make no sense.
These stones
don’t sing out here no more.
The bear, the
poem,
the plastic
flowers gone
got wind
scattered and
torn from the
white cross we planted.
These stones
don’t sing out here no more.
A broken bike
that fell off
someone’s truck,
someone movin’
to
some better
place for speaking their names.
These stones
don’t sing out here no more.
And so I sing,
for them and
all of us,
bones above
and below,
a song about
the forgotten.
And I sing,
sing,
tears like
branding irons,
words explode
on the wind,
“Rise! Fix
this broken bike and ride!
3 Doors, Closed
Door #1
When you smash
the pots I made for you,
put the shards
tip up in the dirt, so they
look like the
sails of small boats or
sharks’ teeth
in a ravaging maw.
Arrange them
in a way that you’ll never
see the pieces
as they originally were,
an assembled
whole where roots struck
bottom but
pushed stems to air and light.
Door #2
If we’re too
stiff to dance,
to move
without arms
pinioned to
priorities
and everyone
on our Friends list,
then what the
fuck are we doing with what time we have?
Door #3
In the end,
you left me with nothing but
an unsigned
card
molding in the
drawer,
mawkish
tropes, doggerel, words you
scanned and
assumed
held weight or
meaning
(or at least
might mean more to me than you).
As days
passed, memory decayed in dirt,
too late for
burial,
the cards
sentiments
an
afterthought with a very short shelf-life.
I Miss My Ring
Muted peel, forgotten bell;
the broken seal
of a shotgun shell.
Skin unbound, denuded, free;
a bloodless sound
where your ring would be.
Empty pall, a phantom limb,
where leaves that fall
sing a dirge-like hymn.
Though the sting is fresh and new,
I miss my ring
but I don’t miss you.
The group liked my poetry, offered very supportive feedback. I don’t know shit about poetry, figured they knew what they were talking about. When I mentioned that I was working on a novel, they were insistent that I bring that work in for them to read. I promise, that wasn’t nearly as creepy as I made it sound. It’s because of that (and other) writer’s group that I have a novel finished and ready to publish.
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