COMMENTARY ON NEVER WITH ONE

     I wrote this poem in nineteen seventy-two.  It was the very first poem I ever had published.  I had forgotten about it until years later.  When I first turned up in English 101 as a freshmen in college, the teacher asked us to write a short paragraph about ourselves.  This poem popped into my mind as a prose poem.  Someday I would like to find that piece.  It made an impression on my teacher that helped me swim in the direction that I finally swam.  There were a lot of eddies along the way.
     It was not until the early nineteen eighties in poetry school that I learned my lessons in line strength.  I would be curious to know it that prose piece complied with what I learned.
    

Never With One

The dark black sky lay above,
     lit by countless worlds of light.
The soft cool earth beneath,
     with countless worlds of darkness.
A man lay in between,
      one with both though never with one.
Breezes of the night cannot still this troubled
      brain.
Life can solve it perhaps in time
      and death will solve it when the time comes.
And he waits, never with one, always in between.
As time passes men will see
      that this is the way it has to be.
As he waits, never with one, all ways in between.

 Angles of Vision 72 printed in Karachi: AISK; ISI; LAS; KAS, 1972

MISSION STATEMENT

      It is probably time to give the reader of this blog, if there ever are any readers of this blog, some clarification as to what A Total Solid Waste is about.  It is, in the beginning at least, going to be a catalog of all my published work.  I have been writing and publishing under another name for years.  During all this time I have never managed to earn a living through my writing.  I believe I finally broke the one hundred dollar mark in earnings in about nineteen ninety-two with a ten dollar check for a poem.  This huge amount of earned income includes the question I sent to the Question Man column in the San Francisco Chronicle in the late sixties.  The question was Would you be dishonest for ten thousand dollars?.  I made fifty dollars for that one line.  I have not had anything in print since about two thousand and one.  I must just like the writing.
     I will be writing under the new nom de guerre of John Smith, IIMXIII.  With this new pen name I hope to be publishing in the world of the online via a website called Triond.  The old work will be here for anybody to access if they are interested.
     The title of this blog comes from how I have spent the last eighteen years earning a living.  I have been helping to manage the solid waste flow of a small university in the Pacific Northwest.  It really has not been a waste of time; I keep telling myself that.  I have learned about the American education system from the bottom up.  I hope to be finished with The Secret World of Garbage soon.
     With a degree in English from another small university and fourteen years of information services in academic libraries, it is amazing what I have learned from the solid waste flow.  Garbage is just another index of how our society works, an hands on example of how the trickle down theory really functions.

       


 

They Love to Touch

I once saw a man at a pretzel stand
with a giant pretzel on top of it.
You couldn't help but know that it was
fake: nobody makes pretzels that big.
He just had to touch it, though, creep!
It should have fallen on him.
It must be the same thing with snow;
they always walk on the clean stuff.
Monkeys will sleep in their own shit
even if you show them how not to.
Even a dog won't do that.
Let them not breed in great numbers
or else they will slime over the world.
The filthy fools remind me of
apes in crimson capes pretending to
be their human masters.  It must
be and oral fixation of the skin and
the thoughts have all atrophied.  It's
possible they have forgotten to feel with
their minds.  Don't get me wrong,
I enjoy a good tussle in the hay
as much as the next person but
this sort of thing isn't lasciviousness.
Opening windows and closing doors
most of the time they don't know what
for.  I think they forgot.  It must be
that they spent too much time with their
hands in their pants or up their skirts
or whatever.  Self-gratification gets
that way after awhile.  Nobody thinks of
the next person who walks across the snow.
Pretzels should learn to fight back.

first published in Wind Row, fall 1984 

Hair Length

It takes a year
to grow four inches of hair.
When I see hair
gently creeping down a back,
an ass, a thigh:
that's at least six years
getting to know it,
eight years without
rash act of shears,
ten years of growing into.

By then, they either know what they are
or it's time for a change.
Black, yellow, brown, red
looking to find out in growing
how the hell to live with it.


          first published in Wind Row, Spring, 1984. 

Country Roads

Country roads don't take me home anymore;
it's the hawks.
In a beat-up truck
throwing dust into the sky,
I'd watch black specks against blue
wind-hunting rodents.
Now, while I walk
through the hills
cutting across the grasses
I see monster hawks
in the high branches of old dead poplars
planted for windbreaks.
The bird's weight makes the spire bend.
They are always still,
watching, waiting, with eyes
that follow: dark birds of prey
in the top most branches.
But, it is only when I walk,
and only when I walk alone.

first published in WindRow, 1984