Poem: “Write the Poem,” Part II
Years ago, my artist friend Laura, who is basically enlightened and sees me more clearly than feels comfortable, gave me a gift.
It’s a tiny, rough wooden frame about an inch and a half tall and the same across. Inside, typed onto a scrap of paper by an antique typewriter so teeny it couldn’t possibly exist, are these words:
Write the poem.
So, I put the frame on my altar and got those words tattooed on my left forearm. The tattoo is messy violet letters, as if an eight-year-old trickster scribbled them there with a Crayola marker while I was napping.
I look at my arm every day. It reminds me to write the poem, that nothing is more important.
To fail to write the poem means one’s ship never sets sail but capsizes meaninglessly before even leaving the dock. It means tearing a gash into the sacred tapestry of the world, a gash in the precise shape of oneself.
Between the tossings and turnings of sleepless nights, no darker thought taunts me.
Sitting with a friend whose mom is dying without trying to dam his tears is writing the poem.
Entering a play in a festival for no practical reason and with no hope for remuneration is writing the poem.
Abandoning one’s responsibilities to betake oneself to the mountains of Nepal for a silent Buddhist retreat is writing the poem.
Reading C.S. Lewis to a child who is sick is writing the poem.
Addressing one’s lunatic finances despite being an aggressively bohemian poet/actor who prides himself on not caring about such trivia is writing the poem.
Telling the unpainted, aging face in your hands you’ll never leave is writing the poem.
Saddling up your broke-down old mare (she’s the only one you got) and cantering out into the war with a diamond burning through your brain is writing the poem.
Writing “Write the Poem” and posting it where you might find it is writing the poem.
In the end, however old one gets, whatever the trolls say, and whoever’s in the White House, one can only find out what is in oneself to do, that true, unblinking light frantic to shine its singular, inimitable hue, and then do it. One can only scour one’s soul for a clue, and then, with the courage of a badger, act.
Write the Poem, Part II
Carve your sign into skin or sky.
Nail will chip, blade will break.
Obey no command, expect no reward.
Scratch your heart into tree or table,
whose beauty will endure
only for the trysts you record
against their stolid grain.
And how the grove of time will shudder
with the strength of your transgressions.
Schooners tack and whip, mad pens scrawling
signatures senselessly into the ledger of the sea,
though the teeth of monsters rend their keels.
With machetes forged in starlight,
shamans hack glyphs through jungles,
eyes aglitter not for gold
but jaguar dreams.
Lace up your boots, traveler.
Let the sun sear your fingers.
Keep going.
Your tracks on these switchbacks
are the sayings on the walls
of Pharaoh’s tomb,
your small, doomed deeds
the very voice of Ra.
Go, go, cut graffiti into glass,
tattoo concrete with razor blades.
Let the city cast you out, let it twitter on.
With spray-paint go illuminate
the sewers of the deep.
Let ink of squid blind your child eyes.
And Li Po will cry,
How this nomad sculpted a citadel
in the soil of her loss!