I Like Muscular Writing...

I like muscular writing.  I’m sick of odes and bullshit covered in convention, words used for their sound and not their meaning.  We swim in bullshit everyday, so why the fuck would you want to commit more of it to a page.  Why not ape Bukowski instead of Thoreau?  One feels real, while the other, it masks reality and puts it out in the countryside to die on the side of a road like a carcass trophy.  Symbolism standing in for meaning and meaning is everything.  We’re not as clever as we’d like to think we are.  We are as transparent as the words we use are concrete.  Why fuck yourself out of clarity for veiled swipes at being understood in some esoteric way.  Clusters of words strung together in the hopes that your cleverness will be appreciated and not the feelings that initiated them.  Most writers tell lies disguised as truths because their fear is being found out that they are just hacks and literary grunts.  Belching daily over a page only to be left with a queasy feeling that you’ve said nothing.  You’ve made no impression and confused understanding with prose.  Word monkeys bangin your chest with a thesaurus and dictionary.  Saying nothing, words devoid of heart and worse, of interest.  We’re surrounded by it.  Pages and screens splattered like the walls of a grisly crime scene.  I like muscular writing, save the gentle shit for your therapists and children.

Operation: “Shopping”…Or, A Middle-Class Version Of Scorched Earth Politics

Storm the castle

Plant the flag in softened, well-trodden dirt

Shop at the ramparts super-store

Grease the tank wheels

Roll over everyone

Keep progressing, moving forward

With slow, mannered precision

Lock step, eyes fixed

Well-covered and camouflaged

Might hidden from sight

Out flanking, out ranking

Without questioning, orders followed

Mission accomplished with minimal collateral damage

Greater goods and services rendered

Civilian living in a boutique war zone

Gentrifying armies

Just enough clicks away to be considered soft targets

Entrenched in bunkered cubicles

Manning cockpit cash registers

With pilotless drones set loose in shopping malls

A focus group enemy of the state

Buying and selling each other’s secrets

Honorably discharged

Into a bloated wallet

Faces flushed and covered with consumer scars

This is living large in an age of large living

This is today being lived in yesteryear

No purchase will bring it back

Storm the castle

                                                                            Repeat... 

Thank You Scott Walker

 No one holds me too close to their skin

Much

These days seem wasted

Such

To point out obvious horizons and connections

Lost

In cloudless sorrow

Form

In infinite borrowed

Time

Reaction to unsolicited vision

Shaded

From blinding white landscapes

Color

Burns from the inside of eyelids

Project

Out into a veiled birth

Conceit

Seldom believed but always enacted

Relief

Never far but far from reach

Belief

Is nothing more than willful ignorance

Discordant

Thoughts torn from the arms of their nursemaids

Sent

Lonely and malnourished to reach adulthood

Bother

Those closest to our skin

Distance

Farther and farther from our skin

Much

Bob Duvet Investigates What Inspires A Man? Or, Music Is In The Ear Of The Beholder.

“What inspires a man?” Bob wondered, as he drove the nail through the plywood he had placed horizontally across his front door. “There, that oughta do it.” He thought, pleased with himself. Inspiration should always begin with, “keeping the wolves at bay” and he had done a piss poor job of that lately. Worse still the wolves he heard howling at his door were more like domesticated Dingos, hardly wolves at all anymore. Just some trace elements left in a DNA code that had been bred out by the constant encroachment of humanity. “AH! Humane society, indeed!” he spoke as one might having reached an epiphany, then realizing there was no one there to share it with. He moved away from the doorway to survey his work, admire the construction and ponder the placement of the next wooden slab. On the carpet below his feet sat an empty glass that still breathed the faint remnants of charcoal and peet. Raising a hammer and methodically orienting a nail he penetrated the wood emitting a ricochet clap. The faded and slightly rusted coffee tin holding the nails rattled in time with the blow. “I’m making music again” a smile creeping across its authors face. SLAP! This one a bit more piercing, with less reverb, but just as tuneful, again the nails lent their shimmer. The hall echoed with the clang of hardened steel softening against the wood tuned with paint. Some inspirations require a little blunt force, Bob thought as he once again raised the hammer next to his ear. The crack of the hammerhead greeting the galvanized surface of the nailhead shook through the corridor. As the soundwaves faded into silence, Bob took a step back. He viewed the asymmetrical wood planks crisscrossing the entryway into his apartment, turned and began walking down the hall into the kitchen. No longer inspired he, he sat down in his chair, laced his fingers together and stared blankly at his computer screen. That wonderful song still playing in his ears.

I’m A Terrible Writer

I’m a terrible writer

A truly gifted and inspired terrible

A terror in every sense of the word

I spit words out

Choke words back

Spend them meaninglessly

Without care

Without concern for meaning

Context

Spelling

Usage

A more terrible writer has never existed

My words populate this page like drifters

Two-bit hustlers

Searching for meaning in

Definitions

Syntax

Punctuation

I type in an effort to relate thoughts that are disingenuine

Uninteresting

Staid

Tired

Boring

I’m a schill for a language I would prefer not to speak

I tell stories I have no interest in telling

I tell them badly

Falsely

Redundantly

Sanctimoniously

I write because I think I should, not because I’m compelled to

I write because it’s never easy and that makes it seem noble

Makes me a fraud

A charlatan

A blowhard

Blowing words out of my fingertips like an oversexed manqué

A plastic shell meant to resemble something

But hollow all the way through

Empty

A voidoid

Another tantrum with nothing behind it

Nothing important to say

I’m a terrible writer

I write everyday