By Carly Yansak
On my daily drives through Austin, I encounter an average of seven bums. There are familiar faces, usual spots, regulars I always expect to see. The intersections are littered with them and everyday I read their plights, crudely marked in Sharpie on cardboard shards….
‘Pandamonium’ Group show @ Signal Gallery, London. http://www.signalgallery.com/
i’ll sing you songs
and i’ll spare you the salty-copper
of tears and blood
you can say that the songs are yours
i’ll smile and give you a dismissive nod
and keep on singing,
someday my songs will be about you.
Answer:
That might be the case, but if I were doing this to be well read maybe I’d be trying to do things a little differently. To me the part that is important is the self expression. If it’s rambling then it’s rambling, but I’ve had better conversations with homeless men than I have hipsters who think that they are entitled to decide what constitutes artistic expression because they got good at pretending they have any idea what Kerouac or Ginsberg or Kesey or Joyce were saying.
But I appreciate the feedback, I’ll keep trying to get to the point where whatever I’m saying isn’t just incoherent rambling and starts to resemble something artistic. That would be a dream.
EDIT:
Also thought it might be worth while mentioning the blatant consumerist undertones to the concept behind your statement that, “If it’s not read it’s not poetry.”
i used to have a lot to say about everything
but every so often i wake up the way i did today
and realize that nothing i have is mine
and it would have been easier to be born free,
to have never had any of it at all.
why should i have felt the breeze is not a wind
and that the rain is not a storm
or that the hungers are not a famine?
why should i be blind by luck
when sight is not so much to bear?
call it hemingway delusion
perhaps if i fall deeper into this pit of drunken stupor
i might find that place in my soul that lets things happen
things that have never happened before
and maybe it’s just everything i’ve learned sober
that lets me doubt myself so persistently
so persistently that even through this haze -
the haze of lucidity one only finds at the bottom of a bottle,
right before the heady weight of one’s on mind falls face first
into a murky pool of nonsense and blacks out to escape itself -
even through this haze things are just not tolerable.
and so perhaps the secret is really just to realize that direction
is actually no direction at all
and no matter how much faith i place in the illusions of my dreams
it’s really all about how many drinks i have had
in order to make this flickering light seem real.
a small flash of recognition
- a star exploding somewhere in the universe of your soul
you saw me again, and each time your eyes landed on mine
that smile playing in the corners of your mouth
erased everything else around us
and i’ll probably never get your name
but i don’t care
i got the best of you last night
far before you wandered home with the guy
who was busy singing his own praises all night.
