So

I wait and wonder what I’d do if someone said pick your 60 best poems. Pick all of them? Or any? Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say “It’s because he’s really gay,” or maybe “really not gay.” * Read Anne Waldman and Terence Winch, Bruce Andrews and Adrienne Rich, wonder what might happen to me this summer if I go away, or stay here in Washington DC where you can see Watergate live! * If you want to know the truth today’s my birthday and though I often feel older, and sometimes appear younger I’m 31, and like everything else that too can be fun or a bummer, a drain on the cosmic energy, depending on what? If you know the answer you win the future; if you don’t the future is ours to lose or— whatever happened to the old way of construction? Well, one line still follows another, and my voices moves between each space, and when I think of you I sweat, or maybe just imagine myself like a cartoon troublemaker big beads of perspiration jumping out from my skin as I cringe behind the fence that the bully is about to throw a bomb over, or drop an anvil over, or just put his meaty fist through and right on into my scared shitless grin, the analogy resting on our mutual vulnerability— that’s poetry isn’t it? * Of course I don’t talk like this. I talk like this. * And now it’s time to go back to THE HISTORY OF ROCK’N’ROLL which means it’s my night to cook dinner for “the house”— collective—and it’s gonna be smoked sausage cooked in peppers and mushrooms and carrots, maybe some onions, and beans for protein, or something nutritional. I picked the sausage because it seemed to be looking at me in the Safeway, not exactly the way I was looking at one of the cashiers, a young man with curly blonde hair and nice build who seemed to have a down home kind of friendliness, or the woman with the little girl the same sizes as Miles, who is a little smaller than Caitlin, both of whom were pulling on my pants leg for pennies for gumballs as I watched the curve of the woman’s arm as she placed each well thought over item on the counter behind my vibrational buying and didn’t even notice how much I fell in love with her arm and felt guilty for objectifying a part of her although she might all be like her arm and then I might fall in love with all of her, but that would cause problems, she probably is already in love with at least one person, and I’m already in love with about fourteen on a regular basis, and that keeps causing all kinds of problems because people who are attracted to my style don’t like my ways—that sounded like a pretentious folk singing prodigy’s idea of an early Dylan line, but what I meant would never be explained right in a poem like this, or one like Anne Waldman’s either though I like to read hers because they make me want to write, and in my world that’s what “great” writers are supposed to do–make everyone else, or at least me, feel like I can write too, and then make me feel, like I will, and then I do. * After dinner we’ll eat the cake Atticus made for my birthday there’ll be some presents from some of the people in the house, and maybe Annie will stop over, or Matthew might call from work, or we might all go down to watch him make salads at FOOD FOR THOUGHT, and maybe eat some too, all along getting stoned on the house doobie, which goes too fast these days but never fast enough, which is about the way I feel on my birthday about my life, either that or the way I’m easily satisfied but never feel I can get too much– sometimes everything is enough, you know? * HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, I THINK I JUST HEARD CHUCK COME IN, CAITLIN’S ANGRY WITH ME AND THROWING A TANTRUM IN HER ROOM, IT’S RAINING BUT I HEAR THE DISHES BEING DONE FINALLY BY SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME * Resolution: No more guilt trips from outside or inside going either direction –is everybody happy?