Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So I pretty much goofed off yesterday between football and doing other non-writing, non-productive things (well, aside from going out for a walk and doing the laundry), and it occured to me this morning that:

--I completely forgot to listen to the Potted Plant Countdown on WAMH's streaming site (Yes, head58, they still have it after all these years, but I don't think they give away potted plants anymore...)

--I completely forgot to do my Dreamwidth poem posting. [On the plus side, I also realized that the subject of holidays could possibly be used in this one. Thank you instant inspiration!]

Ah well...at least I have today off, so I can work on the latter sometime today. And perhaps getting some actual work done as well would be good.



On tap for today:


Going to see this around the corner at the 4 Star later today. I have to say the actor has Ginsburg's voice down perfectly, right down to the delivery of the famous poem itself. I suppose it's fitting that I'm going to see an indie movie about poetry and San Francisco and alternative culture, at an indie movie house around the corner from my apartment here in San Francisco where I do my writing... :)

I grew out of my bedframe a few years ago
So I've just taken it apart and stashed it in the garage
The matress is down on the floor and my cat's freaked out
But I don't mind, it's my own world and I'm happy with it

It's one in the morning and everyone's asleep
But I'm wide awake in my darkened room
Headphones on and the radio set to the lower depths
Celebrating my newfound nonconformity

I've got the Cure posters on the wall
And the random pictures of bands no one's heard of
A single lamp is on next to my bed
Just enough for me to scribble in my notebooks

I'm listening in silence, listening to the overnight
While the rest of the world sleeps their life away
I'm listening to the grooves of an alterative world
And I'll be heading there soon, heading there soon

My life is no longer constrained by the ways and means
Of the society I thought I was a part of
My mind's been freed and I'm pushing it as far as I can
Here in this cave of a bedroom where I lie in wait

Tomorrow I'll be roaming those halls of my old school
I'll be above them, knowing what nobody else knows
Because I've found the soundtrack of my new life
Down here in the depths of the radio dial

I'm listening in silence, listening to the overnight
WHile the rest of the world shutters itself away
I'm listening to the grooves of an alternative world
And I'll be heading there soon, heading there soon



[This poem's title comes from one of the music compilations I made back in the late 80s, and the poem/lyric itself pretty much describes me and my mindset back then, when I was a junior and senior in high school. I've been visiting these memories lately to work on my nonfiction work in progress, tentatively titled Walk in Silence after the first line of Joy Division's "Atmosphere". The book will be a view of the "college rock" era from 1984 to 1989, before alternative music became popular.]

[Crossposted at Dreamwidth]

She had the day off from the market, I was off work by noon,
So we had time to get the hell out of town for awhile
(if only for a little while),
Smoke some, talk some, laugh some, maybe even drink some.
We drove up Wheeler Avenue, past the ponds and the farms,
listening to Radiohead and Spacehog, talking about our idea,
our crazy idea of moving out to Ohio (oh my, Ohio!).
I bummed another Newport off her and rolled down the window,
exhaling the smoke, trying to make the best of a situation.
Who knew where the hell we'd get the money,
when neither of us made more than the other, and I had less than her.

After all these years we'd met up again,
Under the same circumstances of having nowhere interesting to go.
I'd been defeated and was taking my time making a comeback,
And she'd been drifting aimlessly for a few years.
And as we hit North Orange, rolling to a stop at the intersection
with one single car up the way, a rustbucket made its way down the hill.
Both of us wanted to pull out and turn left towards Warwick,
but instead we decided to just sit there for those few long minutes,
waiting for that car to go by.

And eventually we pulled right instead, heading towards Royalston,
back down to Tully Road, and back home.
A short road trip, if anything, barely longer than an album side,
one, maybe two cigarettes' worth of a drive.
We'd be heading down to Amherst that weekend,
Going to see Ben Folds Five at Pearl Street in Noho.
We didn't need to go far today. Just enough to exhale.
Just enough to make the best of our situation.

(This is an experiment that I'm trying right now...most of my poetry has either been in akin to song lyrics or stream of consciousness thoughts. This is the first time I'm actively trying to get some kind of narrative into my poetry.)



Intro:
At thirty-nine I'm trying not to yell
at the kids to get off the lawn.
Not that I have one at the moment,
but point being--things aren't like they used to be.

I:
Back in the day,
I'd use those mottled black-and-white notebooks
to let out my frustration and anger at the world.
A bedroom revolutionary, a nonconformist in my own mind,
Thinking myself better than the jocks and the popular kids
(Screw 'em if they won't include me, if they don't like me!)
by embracing my intellect and my creativity.

Back in the day we didn't have the internet,
We didn't have Facebook or Twitter or the blogosphere
to vent our frustration with half-assed indignation.
Our problems were our own and not everyone else's,
except when we befriended similar lost souls.
We held it back, we kept it to ourselves, and moved on.


II:
Back in the day,
there was that elusive college radio station,
the one I found by accident back in '86,
the one that only came in on a good day during the school year.
By the time I was a junior, the station was ubiquitous in my bedroom--
on when I was getting ready for school, on when I got home,
when I did my homework, when I was writing or drawing or reading.
We thought college DJs were the coolest people, and we wanted to be them.
They were us, they were who we wanted to be.
I taped their sets off the radio, songs that were hard to find.
I borrowed albums and tapes from my friends,
dubbing them on blank cassettes we bought at the Radio Shack.
We were obsessed with music, our music.

Back in the day we didn't have a thousand different stations,
podcasts and feeds all ready to be streamed,
all of them alternative and yet all playing the same playlist.
We didn't have music blogs and file sharing,
with every single release awaiting a questionable download to my PC.
We were obsessed, but we were never this obsessed.

III:
Back in the day,
I wore the green trenchcoat of my friend's grandfathers',
my walkman in one front pocket and cassettes in the other.
I wore that Smiths tee-shirt I bought at Main Street Music,
probably more often than I should have, clean or not.
I let my hair grow away from that dreadful 80's spiky 'do,
because I chose to wear what I wanted to wear,
look how I wanted to look.

Back in the day we understood we were outcasts,
and reveled in that fact. We forgave our detractors.
We never saw the need to protect our own,
because we never saw the need to kill the poseurs.
We sought peace in a troubled world, that was all.


IV:
Back in the day,
we understood the meaning of a Cold War and the meaning of anger,
because we'd grown up with it.
We knew firsthand about making do with what we had,
and making do with not being able to reach any higher than we could.
We were fine with that, as long as we respected our creativity
and our sense of self, our sense of belonging.
As long as we knew we weren't alone, it wasn't so bad.

Back in the day we didn't feel lost in a global world,
unable to unplug and unable to stop feeding ourselves with information,
knowing--or seeming to know--more than we ever thought we would or could.
We might have wanted the world to be a smaller and more accessible place,
but we never thought it would become this overdriven, or this insane.


Outro:
If there's anyone to blame, it's myself.
I could easily back away at any time, away from this car crash of life,
because I'm the only one who can control the intravenous brainfeed.
If there's anyone to blame, it's myself,
in this big and terrifying world.

If there's anything to be done,
it's done now, on my own, on my own time,
from my own heart and from my own mind.

Call me crazy, Call me freaky, Call me childish, Call me Ishmael but I'm going to participate in National Poetry Month, which starts today, by writing either a whole poem or part of a longer one each day. A NaNoWriMo of sorts, I guess...(NaPoeMo?)

I'm sure most of my poems will end up being crap, but if I hold myself to this for the whole month, I think I'll at least come up with something halfway decent. And if it does, I'll post it here. Yeehaw! :)