More from The Dig

The archeological purge of our house continues and, at long last, I have reached the shelves which held the boxes which were filled with the things I wrote long ago. I found my first two Nano efforts (good thing my goal was to write something as bad as possible because wow, I totally rocked that one), and even some poetry from before the invention of the Flash Drive.

I am not so cruel that I will inflict those Nano’s on anyone — unless I find a really funny moment — but I am going to toss out the verse in bits and pieces so folks can meet my imagination as it was in the 90′s.

Funny thing, most of this is the kind of angst-ridden stuff you’d expect from someone in the dumps, but as I recall, I was in pretty good spirits at the time. It may be that, by putting all the sturm and drang into words, I allowed myself to be free and lively in the waking world, kind of like how chipper I was while choreographing stage combat.

I swear I never felt so light of heart as I did after killing MacBeth — over, and over, and over again.

But enough of my psychotic reminiscences and onto the possibly psychotic meanderings of two decades ago, warts and all.

Confidence is high it’ll make everyone feel a lot better about their own writing.

~~~

That guy plays guitar like it’s
Killing him
See the strings coil free
To slice right through the carotid artery

Now blood streams like tears
From every note
Mixing with the smoke
To taste like wine
Warm, bitter wine
The best kind, really
The way it rolls around my tongue
Slides dark down my spine
Tickles the ache
Embraces the need
Damns the senses

All this
All this from just a few tiny drops
Of that musician’s life

(1993 — apparently my ‘Punctuation? We don’t need no stinkin’ punctuation!’ period)

~~~

Oh, here’s a short one:

nothing like
those mortal dreams
so thick
lying beside love
while it seeps
redly
into dust
into the thraot
into spasms
and waking emptiness

(1995 — okay, I remember this because I basically woke up  from a Mars landscape type dream with a coughing spasm and wrote it once I got my breath back. Point of interest, it is NOT romantic to be a pneumonia-ridden actor living in a studio in NYC. Mostly, it just sucks. )

~~~

And one more for the road…

This is a landscape of leftovers
Lint in the mental closet, so to speak
Orts of undigested events left to… well, you get the point
How these scraps continue to disoblige
Staying where they’re not wanted
Shattering threads of Then
Distorting the pristine Now
And still – the view can be quite lovely
Looked at from a certain angle
In a certain light
Silvered by the glow of past-imperfect stars
Sanguinary dew glistens across newly-wet terrain
Setting off the bones quite nicely

(1996 – as you can see, I did a lot of crosswords on the NY subways. ‘Ort’ is a fave of the editors, as are Asta and adit. Given I don’t care for horror in films or books, I have no good explanation for the imagery.)

So there you have it, a few glimpses of a mind that always wanted to write but had no clue how. On days I’m feeling horrible about my writing, I can look back and see I have, indeed, come a long way.

And there’s another box waiting for me to dig through!

For anyone seeking a mental palate cleanser, I recommend visiting Boomie Bol, Becoming Cliche, or onlyfragments. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall down but only in a good way.

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