30/30 - Influences

INFLUENCES

if you asked me I’d probably say

Joni

Aretha

Toni

Fiona

but if I think about it

it’d be

bukowski

miller

dylan

waits

doused broken hearts

with gravel and whisky-voiced men

pool sharking right-handed

maker’s rocks left

observations grow on me like extra limbs

watching more natural than breathing

women

are supposed to

feel for a living

but I have always been that one

thinks too fast on her feet

drags heart from chest into mouth

bites down to taste blood squirt

into brain spray painting

NOTICE ME on grey matter

just so it can get some attention

sole gut instinct

run FAST

be first to abandon

if it weren’t for the 34D’s

I might mistake myself occasionally

for a man

I’m just woman invisibility cloaked in male idiom

refusing limiting vocabulary like tightened corsets

will sit alone at the bar on the dark side of town

if there’s a good story in it

take it pock-marked hung over and ugly

as long as it’s transcendent

sing Ol 55 for breakfast

mantra for lines as achingly simple as hank’s

kayak Port Angeles to breathe Carver’s dying lungs

lost virginity in Fitzgerald’s backyard

trip that Dylan’s lyrics were written by wind

and everybody knows about me and Miller, Henry

rugged where I should be fragile

not interested in complaint

demand to define

Zorah nomading language

from dust to pulp

training our ears with her footsteps

so she could story us true spirit people

no Tess, no Zelda

have never stooped to literary wife

no “Women of the Beats”

no condescending misogyny

no blonde in the bleachers for me

Sandbloom with his sweetness should cover Joni

I cover the grit the flat tires on dirt roads

3 mile icy cold walks behind no bus fare

ain’t eaten today but much obliged for the drink

don’t know where I’m sleeping but I’m sure it will all work out

this is troubadour territory

I am pilgrimage

Malcolm not Martin

I will not polish mean neat and shiny

I will never stop at pretty to think so

dammit – that’s where the real book starts

with a shotgun in a barn in Idaho

deeper truth = better art

there is nothing small

about the language of the heart

but there is more out there

the heart needs exercise to keep beating

love needs practice in real time

enough sometimes to love

the leftover sticky of glucose

on the polished wooden bar

the felt of the left corner pocket

the sound of the cue into the 8

the way it sinks bumps rolls away

because they simply are

and people so frequently just disappear

it happens sometimes

people just

explode

so while I write to live

i write boldly

go where no man has gone before

write woman expressed exposed

even what you don’t want to know

mother kathy acker

father de beauvoir simone

woolf drowns frightened of her power

plath asphyxiates choice but

grandmother francEyE

breathed every moment

of 86 years alive into poetry

grandfather clock

done ticking santa clauses

it is high time we defined

our ever redefining selves ourselves

surrender heartbreak to pool cue

take up life lust with paint brush

paint it paint it paint it paint it

just paint it every damn day.

c. e. amato

4.11

So, I'm now going to 100 poems in 100 days.  I'm not going to keep cross-posting, I think.  You'll have to look in in my FB notes for the rest.