Dear Fellow Workers,
The title here, 'the way I work,' is a bit of a joke; I don't really work in the normal sense. I just sort of drift, or bop around, from one project or notion to another. This is not said as an explanation, or excuse. Anyway, when I go to write a poem, I don't sit around a desk expecting, waiting for it to show up. It's more like leaving a door open and hoping a wayward bird flies in. I am always muttering to myself in my own mind: your people may call it 'thinking.' And sometimes, all this muttering forms some phrases and lines that seems worth jotting down- and so they are all over the place, in journals, on scrap paper, on receipts. They lie around like that for months, or even years before I have some reason to take a look at them and shape them up a bit. I mentioned a week or so ago that I had sifted through them looking for some to submit to a call for poetry, and I found several I thought you might like. This is another of them.
The writer of
write a song for you and you won’t even
know what it means, and it will hit you
like a ton of bricks, and I will say very
little about it for the rest of my life.
hazy late sun coming in. It will sound like
dust motes on the air. It will be a dainty
woman singing loud, and a tough guy
weeping his sad ballad.
the lies and mosquitos. It will stack up like
bowls in a cupboard. It won’t leave you alone.
It will stain you and your whole life, and all
through it, under every overpass,
along every fence line,
at all the stoplights,
you will think of me,
because of the song that I have not yet become the writer of.
