I DON'T WANT TO BE A POET ANYMORE
I don't want to be a poet anymore.
I can't take the weight of the words on my head.
I can't stand the white spaces on the page.
They all live to stand against me,
to inspire me to evil for the sake of poetry.
I have gone so far off the edge of this world
all in the name of inspiration at the bidding of the Muse.
And now there are no more memories in my mind, living has driven them from me.
And there are no more faces in my head because each one was holding me down.
Just the words, the sacred holy words that condemn me to die on this page,
that condemn me to live with fury and delight in each moment.
But the words are too much with me, my head is not my own.
A poet has no identity. A poet is a nightingale.
Why should I labor and waste in the dark for immortal words when they don't preserve me?
My flesh will fail and the words will live. It will do me no good.
Inside my heart is a silent ocean with no shores.
Inside my heart are the sea and the sky and the words.
There is no room for anything else, but the words do not sustain me.
They are a self-perpetuating virus that can't be contained.
I just want to be an ordinary man with no dreams in his chest,
no fire in the pit of his stomach, no insanity behind his eyes.
I have no experiences, just moments waiting to be transcribed.
All I want is to live for the sake of living, not for the words it makes.
But there is no freedom for a poet, there is no escaping the page.
Mother Cabrini
when I visited the church of Mother Cabrini
to look upon the corpse of Mother Cabrini
hollow eyed and haunting in it's glass coffin
I entered through the back entrance
on Mother Cabrini blvd.
the door there has no ancient ornate carving
no symbols of great religious significance
just a single gold door knob
on a slab of oak
that jangled loosely in my hand.
plywood floors creaked below me
in an empty room with only a staircase.
and when I reached the top
and could feel the soles of my shoes
as they slid smoothly against the marble floor of the viewing room
I saw the crowd that had gathered
their backs turned to me, arched.
but I did not have the courage
and left through that same slab of oak.
Alive or dead
There were many nights
dilapidated,
starving,
and my ribs
like a beetle
grinning in my chest,
that I thought
this life will kill me.
The drugs had gone to my head
so I would walk back and forth
between Harlem and Washington Heights,
the George Washington Bridge lit up,
past the Port Authority
with the uptown whores
and the brown bag drunks,
past the dope spots
and the gambling spots
and the homeless encampments
with houses made of rug and tarp
and cardboard.
I would walk until the first sign of light in the sky,
and when the sky turned light,
and when the soccer moms
would come out
with their dogs
and their children barking,
and their charmed lives,
filled with quiet desperation,
instead of screaming eyes
wretched with horror,
I would walk back,
the sun rancid with light
shining on me the whole time.
And as beautiful as night was
with its lights and colors
strung out against the sky,
day was equally disgusting
as terrible as night was tranquil.
So I returned to my apartment
shutting the blinds,
closing out the light,
and losing myself to sleep.
I would wake up when it was dark out
and eat a 99 cent pie.
I would eat as if it was a fat turkey dinner,
and when I stepped out,
I felt more at peace than I ever have again.
The Human Calculus
We are born pure
like diamonds,
then contorted,
rearranged and cut
to fit,
into this,
the best of all possible worlds,
made unlivable by our toxic presence,
morphed by greed,
into a race
to outrun the closed fist,
to outlast the day
in order to reach unconsciousness.
There is no prize.
We are born fools.
Our hunger tells us lies,
and our pride disfigures us.
We sell our souls for some minor comfort -
the screen of a television,
a bottle of booze,
a script of pills,
a pair of open legs,
but there is never any lasting satisfaction,
and our hunger tells us more lies.
You will be filled.
You will be whole.
You will be elevated,
but we are always as empty.
We are never full.
We have become disfigured,
poisoned by the water,
altered at a cellular level
by hormonal meat
and genetic crops.
As the system builds to a desperate climax,
as collapse closes in,
as the barista holds a PhD,
as the prophets are divided,
as the threshold is approached but not passed,
we wilt in the shadow of a world unchanged for a hundred years,
abused by a government corrupted by debt and piracy.
Soon it will fall from the combined weight of the deprived masses,
and we will put the corpse on cement blocks
to makes messiahs from the metal,
and from the absence, a silence will come.
And without either
fire or ice,
everything will be made new.
HIERONYMUS BOSCH IN THE STREET FOR THE CHILDREN OF HARRY ANSLINGER
The dawn sings sweet lullabies as glimmering flakes of twilight dance on the daze.
In the low light of subway car headlamps, chemical dreams are sung on the mandolin of sorrow.
Ejected from mental wards to detox in the sewers with the crocodiles of scum rivers,
we retreated to intoxicated summer vacations of the mind,
panhandling in the decay in order to kick cold turkey in unfurnished apartments.
When we came down, we got high again with the vagrants
whose overturned dreams litter the roadsides on the highways of Filth.
We feared slaving in the fields of minimum wage
and so instead bled in the streets like a rotten corpse in the sun.
We lived in tenement villas of the soul with no money for liquor or cigarettes.
We got loaded off the scripts of crooked croakers
and experienced nuclear explosions in the heart of the sun.
We lived out the rest of our dreams homeless, with a thousand rainchecks from the shelter
afflicted by delirium tremens of the spirit and heartaches of the liver.
And when we were detained in the prison camps of first world tyrants who employ mental prison states,
we made no deals to lower our sentences.
When we were evicted from the flophouses of wicked landlords,
we were forced into the gutter‑caskets of sideways bargains we sealed in the blood of angels.
And we prayed in the name of every saint in the chemical church
for all the pirates of absolute nothing‑waters,
dreaming in the light of the television like it was the dark side of the moon.
Condemned, we were lobotomized by electric shock until mania brought us to rapture.
When we patronized the courtrooms of cruel magistrates, refusing orders from all and ordering none,
they put prices on our heads.
So we inhaled the extracted fumes of rainforest flesh to dream ourselves in reverse.
And when we sieged the cadillac guerillas of conformity back into the fever dream of Filth
in order to fleece their god and pawn their shit, all the good stuff was gone.
So we kicked dope in the jailhouse autumn of our deeds, festering for a triple beam fix
and witnessed while our dreams sat scraped on cement blocks under the terminal dusk
bogged down by an eternity of silent moments inside.
Ben Jorisch is a poet from NYC. He's currently finishing his 5th novel. Ben enjoys breaking through the paradigms and conventions of societal thought in the name of art and creation. He is also a master of Chi Gong.
