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

Everybody’s Talking At Me…Karaoke Night In The Hood! Or, Living On A Dream! Secret Or, It's The Fernet Talking...

OH OH! You're halfway there...

“Hey man!” a voice greeted Bob just as he was crowning the threshold of the door; born into the bar he braced himself for another meaningless conversation. The environs were indistinguishable from the thousands of other “Irish” bars that litter American cities. Places that seem premade and ready to ship once a liquor license is obtained and drunks have been secured. The only thing imported in this particular “Paddy Palace” was the female cousin of the owner who found herself in San Francisco on “holiday” and was dutifully standing behind the lacquered barrier. “Hey Bob!” the voice rang from just over his back shoulder as he continued his journey down the length of the bar, pass empty stools and just as empty regulars. He pivoted to acknowledge what he privately hoped would just disappear. The succession of words making up the sentences that were sure to follow would undoubtedly engage him in another vacuous and pointless exchange. The kind of seemingly endless interactions his life consisted of when he dared venture from the security of his one-bedroom compound. Bob felt the recoil of a smile involuntarily command his face as he reached his hand out to complete the tired gestures of incidental greetings. The only component that made this the least bit exciting was the anticipation of getting the greeting down right. “Clasp hands while pulling the subject inward into a half hug followed by a fist bump to the top of the subject’s back”, he thought to himself, “I think that’s where this greeting is heading.” He had been in the neighborhood too long. He viewed everything, including spontaneous greetings, with a clinical detachment. He felt like a resident doctor eager to test his knowledge of diseased social protocols. The exchange went poorly because he had misdiagnosed the patient, who clearly wanted to do that thing where palms interlock culminating into a fist bump explosion. That’s why he hated all of it. “So, Bob, you gonna sing tonight?”, the talking started. “I’ve been here since noon for the soccer game, I’m WASTED!...I should probably eat something other than Fernet! HA! HA!”, he laughed, sending bits of spit just over Bob’s shoulder. “I might get up and do a song...” he continued. “Yea, you know what you should do? Do you?...Motley Crue!...How’s that one tune go? You know, I’m a dreama..” words rattled off like a Gatling gun. With each sentence it felt like more rounds were being pumped into his body – like in the movies when gangsters shoot their victims so many times the person is stood upright flailing in place before collapsing in a heap. “I need to get something to eat or I’m not gonna make it…FUCK IT! I’ll just have Fernet! HA!...Were you here last night? It was CRAZY! We were getting all kinds of FUCKED UP!” the excited voice raising to match and eventually trump the group of twenty-something girls caterwauling through “Living On A Prayer”. Each trying to pull the microphone closer to their mouths simultaneously, while mimicking the moves of their own imagined stripper past. “Yea, you should sing some FUCKING CRUE DUDE!!”, the voice enthused never noticing that Bob had already turned away and retreated in the main room. “Why do I come down here anyway?” Bob wondered as he intently began flipping the pages of the red vinyl-covered karaoke book laid out at the table in front of him. Maybe he would do Motley Crue after all.  

To Delve, Wade, Or Wallow: Bob Duvet Investigates Silence…Or, Another De-Railed Train Of Thought.

Another sunny, silent day...

“I’m really swimming in it now…” Bob thought for a moment as his right hand guided the white mouse across its grey, rubber landscape. He noticed his reflection distorted and misshapen on the glossy surface beneath his fingertips, like he had entered a house of mirrors at some county fair. It is in these moments we catch glimpses of our true selves, guilty, depraved, searching for comfort in images and release from our habitual nature. The music playing in the background was all wrong. A distraction. A reminder of the impermanence of everything he spent his days putting value on - just another band in a multitude of bands with ironic titles, pleasant sounding enough but inconsequential and distracting. He needed silence, or the “new silence” as he liked to think of it. It was as much silence as someone can expect living in a city, the constant hum of broken people trying to fix a broken world running like a distant motor propelling it forward. Silence, true silence, didn’t exist for anyone anymore. Perhaps, it never did exist at all. There was always something, some sound emanating from somewhere ready to muck up the silence, to distract. A plane flying overhead was no different for him than the trickle of a stream for somebody else. He couldn’t believe that this would prove no less maddening to that person than these sounds were to him in a similar moment of reflection. Just because nature produced them made them no less vile in that moment when one craves perfect silence. Bob hung his head as he came to realization that this “silence” never existed. It could never be obtained. Even in death there was probably some gnawing buzz that permeates the afterlife, there always had to be something fighting to be heard. A fucking refrigerator or the happy giggle of tourists coming across a landmark that inspired them to come to this fucking place and stand outside his window. To interrupt a silence that never really existed. The word no longer was necessary because what it defined never really was. He could prove it just by sitting still and waiting for some clang or bang, hum, buzz, click, rustle, or breath that was held for too long inside him to shatter what he once new as “silence”. He couldn’t even keep himself silent he thought, as he tried to remember what sent him down this thought path? Oh! Snapped out of the loll of introspection he typed, “girls with big tits” into the search engine box.