10 for 10, pt. 1

I'm hosting a book club this month on Erik Larsen's The Devil in the White City. I also started reading Charles Bukowski's The Pleasures of the Damned.

it inspired me to write something. ten poems in ten minutes, as is.

I.

sweet

a little something sweeter

stirred in, folded in the dough or tucked

round the edges

II.

what promised wonderland?

what promised Neverwhere?

hanging over us

in shame, i saw nothing but what I

wanted to believe

III.

what are we but ignorance and what can we ever be? how much to be known and who is there to know it and who knows the very most?

Surely not I. And surely no one.

IV.

They say that ignorance is a blessing and a curse. I suppose i have been blessed and cursed by it.

V.

he sat ahead of me on the train and I saw his writing, decorated sketch lines in a black notebook, and straining looking i read his prose in the flashing winter reflections of the windows.

VI.

oh god it was crap

but i liked you all the more for it.

VII.

A friend of a lover once called my sketches "healthy," and in my offense i remembered. but perhaps my work has never been better described.

VIII.

his errant seed, her fragile feelings, tender bond, grown or severed over passing minutes years and time repeated into derivative retellings each with their own budding colors, one small obsession of a very human family.

IX.

(on Charles Bukowski)

what made him the "laureate of the low life?" "TIME" or his common voice?

X.

(on Chicago)

it wasn't nature that named you charmed city, smattered as you were in pigsblood, swathed in growing lights, resurrected in human spirit to raise from the ashes after that poor lantern shed set the world alight.

it was men--the big ideas and bigger heads--that would praise themselves long before their merit rendered empty promises full.