Sunday Afternoon Comming to Terms with Badly Laid Lines

 
Tomorrow, Monday morning, I have job interview at an Evangelical Graduate school located downtown. I’m way more scared than I have been for the other three job interviews I've had this year. Probably what compounds this fear is the fact that Employment Security has cut me off and cast me out of the Garden of Eden for a mistake I made at the bottom of this month. I committed a sin and I didn’t provide them with a confession they liked so they found me guilty of being a slime ball. The day I opened the verdict, I spent twelve hours writing a cover letter for this front office position I would not have applied for if I hadn’t been cut off. The posting itself had it’s own intangible energy that I somehow picked up on through the Internet. Even though I am scared of this place, I wouldn’t turn down a job offer or the challenge to process through a new environment and the possible poems that could come out of the encounter. A few good poems came out of me when I was a student at George Fox University (where I completed eighteen graduate courses in Theological Studies). Like this one for example in an unusual format for me on mythological creatures and archetypal personalities:
 
 

The sea disappears

as her eyes dilate

shimmering reflections

gaze back

Moving inside

Logos flees

awaking Enkidu

fingers twined overhead

contorted against the bed

clawing

speaking

forgotten tongues

wrestling as Luna ascends

above the great Earth Mother

Mars, Eros, Agape, Venus fuse into one reality

fires of the deep

pulse and flow

the unnamed one breathes new life

into the fertility

of soil

 
 
Today, I went to the park to bask in the sun. Then I tired of trying to read a novel (my attention span has been completely ruined by watching movies at home and surfing through Internet pages), I wandered over to Elliott Bay Books. I sat down with a book of poems and thumbed through all seventy pages. The author was/is forest fire hot, but her poems were kind-of not. There were a few in between the sheets that were good, but not as good as that “I’m from Cuntistan” poem I heard her slam six years ago. “Cuntistan,” according to the poem, is a Middle Eastern country for “my mother’s cunt.” The version in this book seemed to be a horrible facsimile of what I remembered it to be. Maybe, the poem was just more exciting when I heard it back then slammed at the CHAC.

Later, after I got sick of this punk playing pop music on his iPod loud enough for everybody in the store to enjoy, I got up and relocated myself to another part of the store away from the comfy chairs, away from the good looking girl in silky black dress sitting next to me (whom I wished was on me) reading graphic novels, and away from the poetry section. I felt like an old man shouting at children to get off his lawn and turn off their g--dam music. Of course, I’ll be that funky old man sitting on his porch listening to the glory days of Slayer, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC. Eventually, it is going to happen and I’ll be like my younger friend Kirk (who is going to be a father in a few weeks) telling people to stop making out in grocery stores.

I moseyed into the autobiographical section and flipped through a memoir written (or ghost written) by Richard Chamberlain. His book had a short section on the Thornbirds the only romance film I like, but only because it was the last miniseries I saw with my grandmother before she passed away and also because it has enough Shakespearean tragedy to keep my attention. Well, anyhow his book was crap in the way the lines laid down on the page. The only book I looked at this week that I enjoyed how the lines drew out images was Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems. In the past decade, I’ve already worn out two copies of this book and the one I have now is falling apart at the seams. How is it that these famous people can publish crap and good writers get delegated to the fuck you rejection notes? And you wonder why I haven't submitted my work to be thrown into the trash.

That quasi-essay cover letter I penned for that low pay office job was a better piece of writing than that Chamberlain book I thumbed open today. Hell, even that manual on QuickBooks Pro 2010, I looked at for my dad, had laid down lines I could salivate on even though they were completely unenticing.


Well, that's all for today. Tomorrow, after the interview I have another scrabble poetry post to unscramble from my mind....