“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
- Steven Wright
Many of us, dudes especially, grew up being forced to read poetry in school, that to us was just frilly, flowery, la-de-da language from some past age that had nothing to do with us. It seemed pointless and made our heads hurt. We were asked, “What is this poem trying to say?"…We replied with sincere indifference, ”Who cares?" Once we were shed of whatever class it was, we never went within five country miles of poetry again. Early education ruins us for a lot of things.
Well, there's all kinds of poetry in the world I learned later in life. I have found a batch of poets that I like very much and I'm always on the hunt for new ones. I prefer them plain-spoken, a bit gritty and slyly funny. Like the good songwriters we connect with, good poets speak to things we can't always name.
Jim Daniels - I've featured here before. As far as favorites go, he's number one in the rankings right now.
House of Drumming, House of Song
Jim Daniels
Here in Pittsburg, my teenage son and daughter
sing their carefree, fizzy joy. Digging
in the yard, I hear their voices
rise and fall through open windows.
They can carry a tune. They have pockets
big enough, sewn by minor gods
with magic thread and endless dreaming.
In Detroit we never sang.
Not the boys, not the girls.
We listened to rock so loud our ears
smoked, but we were not singers.
We drummed car seats, dashboards,
and each other. We lit lighters
and held them aloft at arena shows.
How could singing be for sissies
when our heroes sang? Equations
and formulas, mysteries and historical texts,
electrical currents, and gym class ordeals,
red arrows and one-way streets, woofers
and tweeters and teeters and totters
all led to the same factory boats,
both anchored and beached on the shore
of the Lake of Industry where we would row
in sand to the gritty stop of retirement,
bailing water the whole time, mechanizing even
our dreams, cutting them short with precision tools
so that breathing itself became our only song.
We lost the hook. Never found the refrain.
We played extended drum solos identical
to our fathers' while the crowd slipped away
to the john, or made out, or passed joints,
or simply nodded off, while the rest of the band
drifted into shadows of dazed drinking.
When they returned we accepted polite applause
for our endurance and steadfast lack of creativity.
My father never sang. In the middle of sweeping,
my mother sometimes burst into song, grabbing
the closest child and howling — Ozzy Osbourne
combined with Patsy Cline at warp speed.
She seemed so happily out of herself
that we fled. Laughing, she chased us.
We laughed too, afraid of wanting
to be caught.
I continue to not sing except alone
in fast-moving automobiles, though I left
that old life long ago, the heavy-metal job,
the muffled solitary drumming,
long lines of tiny bodies, somebody smirking
that we all look alike from above.
I dropped through the trap door
and into what I've been calling my life
for the last thirty years. If there's a beat
of a different drum, I have not heard it.
I want to carry one long note
that slowly sinks into silence.
My family jokes that our “Happy Birthday”
gets the dogs a-howling, so we avoid
even that — straight to cake and ice cream.
We vote for listening, we vote
for mad clapping. We vote for golden
oldies. We endorse the air guitar
and the broomstick mic of lip synching.
My mother hobbled by daily pain ---
I have not heard her sing
in two thousand years. Math
and song were entirely outside
the singed circle of our existence.
My mother, a red planet
on her own rectangular urban orbit.
I want to hear her say, You don't like
my singing? I'll just sing louder
and longer. A lesson we should
have learned: to hell with polite applause.
Even the weeds enjoy getting pulled,
or so I imagine, freed by the dazzle and flash
and sheer volume of my children's young voices,
the sound waves on their way to Mars or Cincinnati
or to the apartment in Sterling Heights, Michigan,
where my 85-year-old parents are just now stirring,
and perhaps while my father makes coffee
and my blind mother attempts to butter toast,
not her fingers, somebody, against
all odds, might briefly
and quietly
hum.