You Are Still My Favourite Poet
You know how it is. Memory is that country where there are
no direct roads and this one leads me to you. How was I supposed to know your poems
weren’t just poems, but prayers, invitations, how is it that now twenty-six years later I remember, realize you wrote prayers to me and it stuck in my head literally like an axe that concept of you can’t be friends and lovers, so I was afraid to lose our friendship. what bullshit, you know, that saying. You can’t be lovers with any one you’re not friends with. But I didn’t get it then, even though I would have loved to have been your lover, even though I wrote to you like some misguided troubadour. getting high and writing crispy critter poem things there in the back of the class, there on the street corners leaning up on the concrete and improvising social commentary as if we knew everything about everything and of course we did.
Now all these years later you come to me,
I’m not sure if its telepathy some intuition of my own. a ghost or are you simply thinking of me now in a way that I can sense?
I’m sitting on the second-floor landing in a house in Ireland where I live now with my wife. I’m sorting through manuscripts, poetry, come across the things you wrote “To Pete”, and I get that sense you know so I say out loud “where are you?”
Me? I’m not in our town or on our streets though I’ve made nostalgic pilgrimages, yet even when I did, I never got this sensation of you. so that’s why I’m wondering. Why now? To the point where you inspire me yet again to write another poem for you…
Yes, I still write, yes, I’m still here in this mystical land whereas you so
aptly put it I am “a great unknown poet”. Where are you though? Did you let them convince you that self-doubts were real or did you catch on that it was just projections on their part. Did you eventually believe them when they told you, you weren’t beautiful? did you ever find out that it wasn’t your body that lacked but rather the boys you chose for lovers were not the men you thought then to be?
Me, I’m still here, I almost got caught out though, remember that last time we met. I was working the shopping mall, an assistant manager as if that meant something, and you were working in a restaurant there or no you were working in some retail shop too. You told me how you’d get tuna sandwich with extra slices of onion for lunch just so you could breathe on the customers later. So that’s what we had for lunch. I was married then for the first time and well you know she ended up being well lets just say that in her way she saved me from the dismal life that staying with her in that town would have been. But you know how it goes, Tam doesn’t play guitar any more divorced last I heard and works for a T.V. company, Jeanie doesn’t paint she’s married with kids to a guy who owns a gas station, Buzzy is dead drove into an I- beam at a construction site on the highway some rainy 2 am attempt to get to Hartford or something. You know like Dylan says, “some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives, don’t know how it all got started don’t know what they do with their lives”.
So, me yes, I’m married but I’m not sure I could describe it accurately. You know everything you ever thought true love and marriage should be but learned that it could never be? Well it can because it is us. We are well blessed with each other. Life has blossomed not withered with her. We live in Ireland now, an old house that is habitable but needs some work, so we do that, you know painting tiling etc. Any way we have two horses both in foal and we live out in the countryside where our nearest neighbours are cattle herds. But I’m still here, still writing, still no luck with the publishers and I didn’t mean for this to be a letter to you because I don’t know where you are. Just meant to write something about our times in high school and the town and how memory is a spiral thing but ended up “talking” to you.
Are you my muse again?
What’s with this, you being so present? It’s never been like this. Of course, I’d think of you, think well of you, read poems I wrote about you and wonder what you’re doing, but this is freaky man. Like I almost called the states to try and get my son to see if he could track you down via the computer or just look you up in the book, but you must have left the town. I know you did long ago. seem to remember, something about Florida or was it some other country?
So, what do you want? Tell me what’s going on girl? Am I getting this flash because you died or because you’re sending cosmic energy or just because I been sorting through tons of poetry coming across the ones you wrote for me?
But like I said I’ve sorted through before and never got such intense feelings and today I intended to do something totally different, but I decided on one more binder of the old stuff and that’s where yours were.
Any way even this isn’t what I meant to do either. I wanted to write something more creative than my speculations as to why I’m getting all these feelings of your presence aroused.
So, any way I have become that great unknown poet. I wouldn’t expect you to remember that,
but you put it in a poem to me that you wrote on the spot during one of our THC days. But you were right about that, you know I’ve been writing poetry since I was in the eighth grade and now, I’m forty-two or three I think three. Trying to get something going but can’t get any luck with the editors. Sometimes I get so pissed off but what can I do? Helpless helpless, helpless…
But who would I be if I weren’t a poet?
Last time I saw Jerry was two years ago. I was back for a visit. It was St. Patrick’s Day. He runs his father’s bar now, The Shamrock downtown, any way the first thing he asks is “are you still writing lad? That’s great! keep it up” But anyway I guess the hard thing is getting out there, being sociable, it seems that art is like any other business, you know if you don’t schmooze you lose. Other than Emily Dickinson I don’t know of others who like me seek to be a poet of isolation. You know they all hung out with other writers and artists, the beats Ginsburg, Kerouac, and Burroughs etc. Henry miller, Anais Nin, and that lot. Oh well not worth complaining about. funny thing memory you know I wanted to tell you how I did some jail time for a drug bust, was ratted out by someone I think we both knew, funny thing is I forget the guy’s name, can you imagine forgetting the name of the guy who got me busted? Now I don’t have organic brain damage or anything so it’s really weird because I would have bet money that I’d remember him for the rest of my life. But I never saw him again after that (that I can recall) but I heard Buzzy and his brother met up with him and beat the shit out of him while I was in New Haven (Great name for the town where the jail is: New Haven). Well that’s what goes around, I guess.
Maybe you’re the new or at least returned muse for me? Maybe a figment of the Robert Graves influences a la white goddess. An archetype rather than true memory? a return to the carefree poetry of youth when we didn’t care who liked what we wrote or if it ever got printed it was enough to simply create for the joy of creation, to create for the joy of ourselves.
so, any way here’s looking at you kid wherever you are…
all acts of freedom are dangerous
(4LF~1998)
new haven ct artist not known
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