One voice talking

A cool breezy
Saturday morning
full of canibus
and coffee,
in shamrock
printer boxers,
I sit down
 to write,
changing
the music
from Tom Waits
to something
by Bach,
featuring cellos.


I can't write to a song
with lyrics.

Pin Drop

She said,

You're an ass,
you know that?
 Look at you.
You are a
fifty year old
man that wears
skinny jeans and
three pounds of
stainless steel
jewelry. You'd
rather jerk-off
to young tatted-up
blue haired girls
that read your
poetry than fuck
and you are
living rent free
in my spare room ...

seriously ...

an ass.
You're gonna
sit there all
sad and tell me
nobody loves you? ...
that I don't love you?
An ass I tell you,
I am going to bed.

Then she
slammed the
door.

Things got
real quiet.

She knows

Once she read
to me,
like story time
only better, the
most beautiful girl
in the world.

Something sad,
and funny,
quirky but good.
She read of
raindrops bruising
flower petals.
I watched her
read, the way
her lips shaped
the words her
expression framed
each mood.

She knows
I love her.

She watches me
sometimes with
eyes more wonderful
than any seven
things ever,
present or past.
She looks at me
and her eyes that
whisper passages
in French about
love making
hold me rapt.
I do not speak
French but crave her
attentions sans pudeur

and she knows.

A pretty girl took
her away to sleep
under electric blankets
and watch movies
about other times
and loves.
Chick porn I say,
and she laughs
tells the pretty girl
that only
porn is porn
but chick flicks
are great too.
I begin writing
this poem as
they leave me.

She knows no one
will ever see it.

I share her love
with another and
ours is the one held
quiet as sin.
I love her
silent and secret.
It is enough
for me that

she knows.

Wishes

I wish you
had money,
she said
pausing the
Youtube
beauty tutorial
and smiled an
apple extending
smile tempting
Grace.

You mean you
wish your
sugar daddy
wasn't some
broke ass
nobody knows
him poet.

I just know
you'd buy me
things
if you had
money.

Yes was all
he said,
if I weren't
a poet,
silently implied.

She sat Indian
style in the living
room floor,
cut-off shorts and
a Keep Austin
Wierd tank top,
practiced
putting  on
midnight eyes
and matte liquid
lips made,
it seemed,
for kissing.

And she was a woman.
And she was art.

An object of beauty.
A being full of life.
And he thought
I wish I had money
I'd write poems
for you every night
and you'd forever
be art.

PREVIEW "The Death of Ethan Blue".

 PREVIEW "The Death of Ethan Blue".

"I'll tell you something else, the goddamn academics and the good magazines, some of them knew how good my shit was. A lot of those guys loved my stuff, read it and loved it. They all cockblocked me - some of them jealous but most afraid of me. If I had been full of shit, some Bukowski wannabe, faking it, pretending then they'd have loved me. I kept it 100, when I get drunk, I get all the way drunk. When I tell about the smell of the barracks after breakfast in prison when the punks stayed back, its because I saw them motherfuckers falling in love with each other ... and god bless 'em. All I ever watched was my timecard , that was what was subject to change. People helped me, so what?  I lived with women and let them buy my drinks and dinner. I wasn't a hustler, I didn't lie to those girls I loved them all. I was a Grinder, I went and got mine but those bastards were afraid the emperor had no clothes. That I had bullshitted them so much that I made them love my poetry. That somehow it was a trick. Oh and god forbid they be the first to like something great, something new. The cocksuckers. No man can be a prophet around here, haters is all. I'm a goddamn genius. Well, I guess I'm close as we got now."

"I think you're tired Ethan, why don't you just lay down on the couch. I'll get you a blanket."
 Before she got back with the blanket he was passed out, she picked up his bottle put it in the kitchen, came back and pulled his boots off. She kissed his forehead, turned and wiping away a tear went to bed.

Obituary

He was a reckless drunk and hopeless in one breath, an idealist the next. I first saw him, leaned into a podium for stability, in the little pizza joint on Chester in Little Rock. He read poetry for half an hour maybe longer, weaving personal stories in between as he went. It was October 2013. He was soberish, which was a surprise; he was soulful and funny, which wasn’t. The adoring audience sat transfixed through his entire thing. They laughed at all the right things, and spoke in collective silence during the saddest parts.
 About two years later I saw him again. He was so drunk he couldn’t finish a thought as he tried to speak between poems, the poems themselves could be heard well enough despite his slurred speech, it was clear he'd done them over and over, his most polished set. His go to, nearly gone. Embarrassed fans started filing out after fifteen minutes as he fumbled and twisted his words into gibberish. Some stuck it out to the end, feeling guilty for watching, but—well, you never knew what might happen when The Outlaw Poet Ethan Blue was onstage. After the show, he they woke him at his table and helped carry him out, where they took him I don't know.
Blue was a holy mess, his life a mix of the sublime and the horrific. By the time he died of a heart attack a couple of years ago the Arkansas native had written a large batch of enduring short stories and poetry and a novel, Hooker's, Ex-wives, and Other Lovers. The larger than life cult figure had also become the subject of colorful tales - some of them probably even true.
And yet he remains today what he was all his wild, heartbreaking life: a Delta native half poet and part performance artist honored by peers and ardent fans but largely unknown in the mainstream. He never had a book deal with a major publisher. He was not a college graduate, didn't go about being a writer in the conventional way and was never much concerned with his career. He was never concerned with much of anything, in fact, but writing, touring, and hanging out with friends and families who had adopted him. That is how I knew him all that time ago. My mother brought him home and he lived with us off and on until a move to Austin separated us all. He stayed in Arkansas, and even for me and others that knew him a while, became half living and half legend.
 He loved paradox—living it and spreading it. Born into comfort if not riches, his father was an Elder in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he preferred the company of sinners, the poor and desperate and sometimes gave away what money he had. He was a lighthearted prankster who wrote some of the saddest poetry in the last half a century. He wrote about how precious it was to be alive yet spent a good deal of his life killing himself with drugs and alcohol. A kind of death cult grew up around him fed by stories and myth—some of his own making, some of his fans’, many of whom saw romance in his self-destruction. When he died, for me the most surprising thing was that he had lived so long.

The Farm

With a barely audible grunt, aching joints, and nagging singularity of purpose Alvis swung his legs over the side of the feather mattress where he had slept since his own father took a spell and went to live with an Indian woman who told fortunes and went down on men for a living. When he was a teen Alvis had thought that the witch put a spell on his pa or maybe had brewed up some kind of a potion to trick him. Uncle Roy had told him that his dad had seen things over there in Europe when he and a couple of the others from around town had gone over to fight the Nazi's. When he said Nazis it rhymed with hat trees and something about his voice made Alvis think of the old farmers and timber men who had served in that one. He had been proud that local men like his father had served well.
They were heroes.
They saved America.
The world. They had saved the farm.
So the boy and Roy worked the farm. The farm was constant and there was always work to be done with little time for whimsy. Alvis took comfort in that. All of these years later, Roy long was gone, mother and a wife passed, the consistency of farm life remained. This one thing, the relationship with her, the farm- it had been his entire life the most important thing, and lately his hope for a legacy. This was the first morning he had ever resented the farm for her selfish calls for attention.
Dressed and looking out the kitchen window as he filled the percolator with water he looked at the place, the fields , the crops and he was no longer attached. The difference went unnoticed in him, and everything went grey.
"For what, for who?" , he asked no one at all.
After starting coffee, Alvis crossed the large kitchen to sit at the table and wait. Just before pulling out his chair he raised his hand toward the dial of an old Zenith radio, then let it fall again, uncalled on to complete the near-daily task of tuning in the local country station.He listened instead to the hissing and sputtering of the percolator atop the gas stove. Most people used the electric ones now but Alvis was not a man who was comfortable with change.
After a cup, he made toast but nearly burned it, then carried it on a saucer to the table. It was still intact as he rinsed his cup and sat it on the window sill over the sink. A small dust devil twisted and moved across sandy dirt turn rows and he felt insulted by the wind itself. He was angered by the soil, fat and fertile. The farm was a tease who promised far more than she ever delivered. He pulled his cap from a peg as he went outside to work just like he always did. Coaxing her into fruition with sweat and wisdom earned with disappointment or a plodding success, it was his lot.

His Poems

The way
he flicked gently
open his late
Grandfather's
chunky Zippo-

its finish worn
and polished
by the fine
Delta dirt
and overall
pocket
of a man
who climbed
daily
on and off
a red Farmall
tractor-

the way he
drew deeply
on the hand
fashioned
cigarette,
breathing
out a great cloud
then still
allowing the last
slender bit
of smoke to
escape gently
from his nostrils.

It was
the way he
dropped his chin
and pushed back
his hair
up and straight out
and gave a
well rehearsed
cutting up of his eyes
the way a
boy might
when he first
wooed his
mother.

The women that
he had been with,

the drugs
and the booze,
and prisons
and jails,

and
the women-

this last one
most of all.

This was
the tragedy
he wrote.

These were
his poems.

His work,
then,
that of recorder
of the
melancholy
life
he had created.

I'd Never

I remember

once when

I would never

grow old,

so many 

years ago 

now.

Just being grown

seemed so

many miles

from that FHA

house in Caraway

on cemetery road.

That was Then,

and Rumblefish,

a full set of 

Worldbooks from

1976, and a 

black and white

set out back,

beside my 

roll-away bed.

Life's lesson,

love doesn't last

and a marriage.

A move, and 

a new home.

I remember 

when Jonesboro

seemed so large.

I remember

when I 

could not die.

I pulled back 

scarlet swirls 

and pushed 

them in again.

I rode on top,

outside of cars.

I carried 

my big brothers 

.22 pistol 

tucked in my 

waistband,

the grip was 

small and branded

with a buffalo.  

Wind rushed

through my hair, 

and dope 

through the rest,

at some point then,

feeling alone.

I remember

finding a wife,

building a home,

I remember 

when my daughters

still spoke 

to me.

I remember rehabs,

and prisons, and

life on the streets-

a cardboard sign

and spare change.

I remember.

I remember once,

I would never grow old.

Open Campus Kids

I want a burger
from the Dog,
with too much
mustard and onions,
and a Big K cola
to wash it down.

I want to stand
around the side after
and burn one
with those people
I used to go there
with, the people
from Nettleton High.

I want to be teen
sure
about everything
and nothing
but just
for a moment.

Just for a little,
I'd like to be young.