I’ve always been an avid reader, but I’ve also always been mostly ambivalent about reading poetry. Growing up Hoosier and all, I’ve liked James Whitcomb Riley’s stuff since I was a little kid, and “Little Orphant Annie” still gives me the willies. Dr. Seuss was my shit when I was a tyke, much to my mom’s chagrin. She somehow got it in her head that reading Dr. Seuss would “warp my mind”. She had the same reservations about the 1983 television miniseries V, as well as Twin Peaks. If she was still alive, I believe she would suspect that she was correct about the mind-warping. My family has never understood me, but I’m not gonna get into that right now. I gotta save something for the book, am I right?

I think my main obstacle, re: wanting to read poetry stems from my senior year of high school, when I took L202 (a college-level Literary Interpretation class offered for dual credit). We analyzed and parsed and picked over Shakespeare and Dickinson and Frost and Plath and more until none of it could ever again be anything but a collection of meaningless words, devoid of any of the humanity those words might ever have had.

There are a few exceptions to my “Joel doesn’t like poetry” rule. I love Poe, and Shel Silverstein, and Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost (in spite of the over-analyzation), and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Waste Land”, and a lot of others I’m sure I’ll think of after I mash that “Publish” button. I enjoy most of Jack Kerouac’s poetry, when he wasn’t too far up his own ass with his jazz notions. Big Sur is one of my favorite books ever, but “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur”, the poem he composed during the events semi-fictionalized in that novel, is nonsense to me. To be fair, though, I’ve never had to deal with sudden, overwhelming fame or alcohol withdrawal-induced panic attacks, so I can’t say for certain that the Pacific Ocean doesn’t sound like that.

The only author I can think of offhand whose poetry I ever really read on purpose anymore is Charles Bukowski. I know Bukowski was at best a very problematic human being, and I certainly don’t condone his behavior or consider him any kind of role model, but you can’t say he wasn’t honest, and goddamn, could he write. I’ve read his screenplay for Barfly, as well as his fictionalized account of that experience, Hollywood, and I like both. The movie is worth watching, too. Mickey Rourke is iconic as Henry Chinaski.

I’ve also read a big chunk of his short stories, and I can’t recall not enjoying any of them, but I think I enjoy his poetry more than his other writing. It has the same realness and rawness of his prose, but the poetic form makes it even more real, and more raw, like a carcass bleached clean by the sun.

Anyway, I wrote a poem today.

I used to write poems pretty regularly, but the urge hasn’t struck me much since I left Texas to return home to Indiana in ’06 (I lost the urge in the divorce, I guess). I have a lot of journals I kept between the ages of 18-24, and they contain an alarming number of extremely embarrassing poems about being lovesick and forlorn. Thankfully I never actually used the words “lovesick” or “forlorn” in any of my poems. That would’ve been much worse.

I did, however, self-publish/print-for-free-at-the-computer-lab-on-campus-when-I-was-in-college¹ a book whose very existence mortifies me. It was a collection of my embarrassing poems combined with a collection of my even more embarrassing journal entries from when I was 22 years old and going through Some Shit That Nobody Else in the World Could Ever Possibly Understand (aka a broken heart). I gave a copy of that book to Henry Rollins once. He was very polite and gracious, and he said he liked the title (All Aboard the Joel Train) which is the only thing about that book that doesn’t embarrass me. I immediately regretted giving him a copy, and one of my greatest hopes in life is that he never read it. I thanked him in the introduction “for inspiration, in both writing and life”, and I included a handwritten note inside inviting him to contact me if he wanted to.

I continued to dabble in poetry well into my mid-twenties (right around the time I moved to Texas, now that I think about it), and then at some point, my writing just began to move away from it. I recently came upon an unfinished poem I wrote for Sheila not long after we started dating, and I think that might’ve been the last one I wrote until today, so I guess I maybe just finished my first poem in a quarter century. I’m not gonna say it’s good, but it made me laugh, so I decided to share it here. At any rate, it’s 100% better and 120% less embarrassing than anything I wrote when I was 20 years old.

“bling”

stumbling
and
mumbling
and
grumbling
and
tumbling
and
crumbling
and
jumbling
and
bumbling
and
fumbling
and
finally
thumbling
and
something called
scumbling
and
those are the words
that all rhyme with
humbling

I told you it was kinda dumb.

Thanks for reading. If you liked it/didn’t hate it, feel free to leave a comment and/or share it with your friends. If you did hate it, you could still share it with your friends, then you could all make fun of it together. Please don’t be mean in the comments, though. I have more feelings than my burly appearance and my surly demeanor might have you believe.

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¹In retrospect, I might have been part of the university’s decision to start charging for copies.