The stage lights are unforgiving, revealing every inch of ugly sculpted onto Sickboy’s gruesome mug. He stumbles a bit as he steps up to the microphone. He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from the back pocket of his torn and dirty bluejeans. A few hours earlier he had stolen a pen from the Lotto counter in the liquor store just to jot down a few lines of verse on the back of an old discarded Winston’s flyer. Now on stage, with his scribbles in hand, Sickboy nervously begins.
“Uhhh… Since this is my first time reciting my scribbles into a hand-held electronic sound amplification device, under hot lights and in front of a group of living, breathing, drinking listeners, I thought I would start with something kind of upbeat. I wrote this poem. It’s a real feel-good rhyme, the kind that makes you smile and want to hug your mother. Oh, and by the way… Poetry is not just for pussies. I just wanted to say that.”
There’s a lonely so deep down the shaft of this well.
I was fetching a drink the moment I fell.
A pail on a rope.
Unquenchable thirst.
It’s clear to me now, this well is cursed.Pitch black. Damp. Slime coats the wall.
Colder and darker the longer I fall.
Subterranean terror.
A pinpoint of light.
As the opening shrinks and fades out of sight.Ten meters per second per second I sink,
Unending descent instead of a drink.
How did this happen?
When will it end?
Unanswerable questions, my only friends.Surely colors explode on the surface above,
Amongst laughter and learning and art and true love.
Sunlit existence.
Life above ground.
Down here there’s no feeling, no light and no soundI thought I’d fall through the lithosphere and blast through the core,
Emerge from a well on some Far Eastern shore.
Science of the rock.
Best I can tell,
Nature’s rules do not apply in the darkness of the well.Satan’s realm approaches, perhaps the end that I desire.
But demons rise above me as I plummet past the fire.
I envy the sinners.
They landed in Hell.
While I’ve yet to stop falling since the moment I fell.
Sickboy smirks and emits a sigh of relief as he steps off the stage. He is proud of himself, one smartass yet oddly sensitive drunk scribbler…a regular Edgar Alan Schmoe…but most definitely not a pussy.
1 Comment
August 12, 2009 at 8:02 pm
“poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can’t find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant’s fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.”
- Charles Bukowski