Poetry in motion
I count and recount Gus’s fingers as though maybe, against all reason, I’ll find I’ve been miscounting up until now. It would be like one of those dreams where you come home to find your house has no roof and your father is a dog. In such dreams, we shrug our shoulders and carry on. But it’s not just in dreams that we untie the knots of absurdity. If I came into Gus’s room to find him flying above his crib, it’d be no more absurd than what’s already come to pass – a human being has appeared out of nowhere!
I used to grapple with the absurdity of life through poetry. I’d actually write poems about stuff like the unknowable nature of baby toes. As a young man I’d perform my poems at open mics around town. I remember once, in the middle of a performance at a cafe, a car outside wouldn’t stop honking so I walked off the stage, went over to the open window and yelled out, calling the honker a cretin. It was exhilarating.
The highlight of my career came at the 1994 Lollapalooza music festival. The Beastie Boys. Nick Cave. And me. But while they were performing on the main stage, I read my poems in the spoken word tent, a 50-square-foot space beside a parking lot with little to no foot traffic. In preparation, I made 100 copies of my 8 page booklet of poems. I wondered if 100 would suffice. By the end of the day, I’d only sold 3. While I fancied myself a beat poet, I was really more of a B poet – each poem was a b-movie full of cliches, flimsy metaphors and, in a couple of instances, werewolves. A fan of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot, I thought the goal of poetry was to be as inscrutable as possible, to confound and never entertain.
Now, on the odd occasion when I write a poem, it’s simple and prosaic, about how I wish I had Van Morrison’s voice. Or a yogurt left in the fridge. Mostly, I keep them to myself. They’re inspired by a sense of how precious the world is and yet how I can’t stop it from fading from my touch. These poems come from wanting to create other fingers with which to reach out and touch. They come from a desire to save my experience from oblivion, to slow down time, to cradle a moment.
Looking upon my son, the words come easily. “This little piggy went to market,” I intone while pinching each of Gus’s toes, “This little piggy stayed home.”
A flare for the absurd! I still got it.