When you're awake and not drunk, not sleepy, not preoccupied with worries, thoughts roar past like Niagara. You pick one, wet, from a thousand, say it out loud or type it, while all the other thoughts aren't in your head even long enough to be forgotten.
Well, once upon a Thursday, on my way to a cheeseburger for breakfast, ten minutes of waiting was waiting for me at the bus station. Pacing between pigeons and bums, I thought about all the thoughts getting away from me, and tried to snag 'em all.
Pulled a pen from my pocket and wrote in my notebook fast as my fingers could twitch, but there's a lot of water in Niagara. I took shorthand for one thought, then another and another, but twenty times as many floated past and got away.
Here's some fraction of a fraction of it, dried out a few days later, minus 19 scribbles I couldn't make sense of:
—
This is a stupid idea and won't work
Look at that dipshit teenager
with his pants at his knees
barely able to walk
Old lady sprinkles old bread for the pigeons
Pigeon — ha —
was my nickname for a girl 40 years ago
Does she ever think of me?
How can that bum look so lost
when he's so young?
It took me a lifetime to get that lost
Hope not, cuz jeez he's fat
A girl who might be 15,
wearing a hooker uniform
denim shorts, neon top, ridiculous boots
Or maybe that's only a style
Gotta pee
Why are there no public toilets?
Christ, there's a nun — a walking wasted life
Are the security guards looking at me? At anything?
What do they do all day,
just watching people
Like me. I'm watching people,
but nobody pays me to watch.
My mistake — that fat man isn't really so huge
He's wearing his backpack in front
Jeez, that woman looks normal. How bizarre
All the garbage here.
Do they ever clean the transit center?
Psycho bum bangs on a sign,
the sign with the rider rules
Pretty sure banging on the sign
is against the rules,
but the security guards don't care
The morning sun catches that
lady's cigarette smoke
and it looks poetic
Still gotta pee,
but in fifteen minutes I'll be at the diner
Some old man is squinting at the posted schedules
Probably he's new to transit
confused about which line goes where
I'd offer to help, if I was a decent guy
I miss you, Stephanie
My wife, dead at 48
Fuck everything
Bum walks by, talking to himself
but I can't make out a word
That lady couldn't be more Greek
if she was on a sign for a gyro shop
Never seen that man before,
but one glance and I hate him
Flock of pigeons fly right at me
Two youngish while men are watching
an old bum dig through a trash barrel
And laughing at him
They're far enough away,
maybe the bum doesn't hear the laughs
Soon comes autumn, and I don't care
There are a dozen bums here
And two preachers who, thank God, don't preach
They just stand there,
holding out Jesus pamphlets nobody takes
All these people —
a hundred of us, waiting for different buses
Most of us miserable
Nobody's really happy, are they?
Western civilization in ruins
Damn, there goes my knee again
Once if a while it almost slips out of the socket
It'll topple me one day
How did I get so old?
Budweiser billboard, fuck you
for making me think about your brand
If I was 25 years younger, 100 pounds lighter,
would some woman somewhere have sex with me?
Probably not
Is my crewcut as perplexing to that man
as his ponytail is to me?
All the idiots in all the cars
rolling past on the busy street
They have places to be, people to fuck over,
hurry hurry
I have no place to be but breakfast
I miss you, Stephanie
God, I am so alone
And barely care about anything any more
But I do wonder about those guys,
still laughing at the homeless man
Laugh, idiots
But there are worse things in your past…
and definitely in your future …
than whatever a bum finds in the garbage
9/26/2023
itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS NEXT →
All these years I thought you and I agreed on poetry. That it sucks!
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying yours sucks and it doesn't, but I never thought I'd see the day
Poetry is like farts — everyone else's are awful.
DeleteT. S. Eliot (click)
DeleteSo is this going to become a poetry zine Doug? It would be about the only poetry Id read but I would.
DeleteI wouldn't do that to you.
Deleteunusual but I liked it
ReplyDeletevery doug despite being poetry
When I was driving once
ReplyDeleteI saw this painted on a bridge
"I don't want the world
I just want your half"
It's Ana Ng but I've never known what it means (the song, not that lyric).
DeleteANA NG
DeleteMake a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town in a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Showing the home of the one, this was written for
My apartment looks upside down from there
Water spirals the wrong way out the sink
And her voice is a backwards record
It's like a whirlpool and it never ends
Ana Ng and I are getting old
And we still haven't walked
In the glow of each other's majestic presence
Listen Ana, hear my words
They're the ones you would think
I would say if there was a me for you
All alone at the '64 World's Fair
Eighty dolls yelling, "Small girl after all"
Who was at the Dupont Pavilion?
Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?
Or the time when the storm tangled up the wire
To the horn on the pole at the bus depot
And in back of the edge of hearing
These are the words that the voice was repeating
Ana Ng and I are getting old
And we still haven't walked
In the glow of each other's majestic presence
Listen Ana, hear my words
They're the ones you would think
I would say if there was a me for you
When I was driving once
I saw this painted on a bridge
"I don't want the world
I just want your half"
They don't need me here and I know you're there
Where the world goes by like the humid air
And it sticks like a broken record
Everything sticks like a broken record
Everything sticks until it goes away
And the truth is, we don't know anything
Ana Ng and I are getting old
And we still haven't walked
In the glow of each other's majestic presence
Listen Ana, hear my words
They're the ones you would think
I would say if there was a me for you
Ana Ng and I are getting old
And we still haven't walked
In the glow of each other's majestic presence
Listen Ana, hear my words
They're the ones you would think
I would say if there was a me for you
Songwriters: John Flansburgh / John Linnell
Ana Ng lyrics © T M B G Music
Yeah but
Deletebut
what the heck does it mean?
What does The Road Not Taken mean? or Prufrock or, for that matter, Nighthawks or The Starry Night? Because poems are part way between a story and a painting and lyrics are poems with a bass player. When things are created matters a little, and this song was written in 1986 or so, less than 15 years after America's exit from Vietnam. Ng is a Vietnamese surname and Ana is a frequently Americanized given name.
ReplyDeleteThe writer is receiving information obliquely, from a still warm bench in an abandoned World's Fair exhibit. It is now for you as an observer of the writer's work to discern the writer's meaning from the brushstrokes of language TMBG left for us all those years ago.
jtb
Love you, man, but that's what bugs me about poetry. Someone's asking *me* to do the work of figuring out what *they* mean. But jeez, I have a hard enough time figuring out what *I* mean.
DeleteDoes They Might Be Giants not respect my laziness? What's with all this dang ambiguity, instead of plainly making a point, preferably in bold print or italics so's it can be found even quicker?
(I'm kidding, of course.)
Doug, I can write a short piece about Dylan's Oxford Town, but you remember James Meredith or have at least read about him. TMBG write abstract lyrics that don't always yield to easy interpretation. As I noted a while ago, I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die is a pretty clear answer to The Who's My Generation. Most of their lyrics are less straightforward.
ReplyDeleteSo no, I doubt that the Johns respect our lazynesses. I'm not quite up to going line for line and telling you what each line means to me. I suspect it's complicated and, again, oblique. It's partly the nature of lyrics and partly the nature of TMBG. I like their music and I get some of their lyrics. I'm willing to go on listening without understanding all of them.
I can't just listen to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and be satisfied. "As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most" isn't gonna get me through the night. Prufrock will, but I'll never understand every line. I first read it when I was, maybe 14. It meant almost nothing. When I was 66 and was recovering from a heart attack it meant a lot. I marveled that Eliot, as a college student, was able to write that eloquently about aging. I'll never get the whole thing, and I can live with that. If poetry and lyrics were prose we'd understand everything and life would be horribly dull. No new bridges to cross or jump off of.
Were I a better writer I could say all this much more clearly. I have fun listening to TMBG's lyrics. They've been part of my life since I was 40 (and that's a long, long time). I have a blue canary nightlight in my kitchen and I do my best to make a little birdhouse in my soul. I feel challenged, but rarely insulted by their lyrics. When I feel insulted I'll be ready to switch over to Garth Brooks, heaven help me.
John
You thought I wouldn't get the blue canary reference, dincha? Well, bwa ha ha!
DeletePoetry swing like a pendulum do, but I prefer it with a melody.
People come and go, talking about Michelangelo, but nobody *does* anything about it.
I do hope you never grow weary of educating this correspondent.
Dougles, I'm a student, not a teacher. Every time I write a longish comment I'm all over the web learning new things about words, ideas and perspectives. If you also get something out of my scrawling that's a bonus. You're sneaky smart and I enjoy that. It never occurred to me that you'd swing and miss on the canary. That was a nugget for you to, I hope, enjoy.
DeleteI grow old but never weary.
as always,
John
I grow old, and weary almost always. Tonight I'm weary almost like I'd worked.
DeleteYou must've caught my semi-sly Prufrock reference? Gave it a full read to get it, and you know what? I got it. It's a damn fine piece.
I think that's terrific. I've read Prufrock dozens of times and got my start from a wonderful 8th grade English teacher. He pointed the way, and I pick up something new every time. The teacher is long gone, but I'm still here and still learning.
ReplyDeleteJohn
And still teaching.
DeleteIt's meme genetics — what you're taught makes you who you are, and bit of you rub off on everyone else and help make them what they are, and they spread their bits too, and some of your bits might be in their bits, to the end of time.
I never saw Herb Warner give up on anybody. He spent five years in college so he could teach 8th graders at a time when teachers were criminally underpaid. But every day, at least for the 50 minutes I spent with him, he read Eliot and Pound and even Ferlinghetti to 14-year-olds who ALL wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Sixty years later I can hear him reading The Waste Land, singing the last four lines, and trying to do the impossible: persuade adolescents that poetry could enhance their lives.
DeleteJohn
> ...he read Eliot and Pound and even Ferlinghetti to 14-year-olds who ALL wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else.
DeleteDid he get through to many of them, or was it only you?
With all due respect to 14-year-olds, I expect many would be immune, possibly for life.
Poetry is for the wounded in spirit. A gotta believe there were a couple more of us in the class, but I'll never know.
Deletejtb
Being "in a band" is cool at 14, and writing a song for the band is acceptable, but appreciating poetry not meant to be sung would've gotten anyone's ass kicked at my school.
DeleteLittle frickin' monsters all of 'em.
Except me, of course, and you.
He must have known he'd be batting under .100 -- he was committed but not deranged. Imagine playing 40 underpaid years and knowing that in your very best season you'll be lucky to reach halfway to the Mendoza Line. He didn't have to teach from a textbook -- he could have used some Beatles lyrics as examples of modern poetry. But he knew we'd find those on our own.
DeleteHe read -- recited really -- the Henry V St Crispin's Day speech (we happy few, we band of brothers) and I felt the genius. I went home and looked it up in a book (my Mom was a bit of a Shakespeare fan, so The Bard was in her modest library). Yup, Herb was right: I'd follow that Henry guy anywhere.
Sorry, just thinking out loud. I'd almost forgotten how Herb shanghaied be into poetry and a little lit.
John
I had one great teacher like that, but only one, and he wasn't a poetry guy or who knows t he like I might've had. Could've been a shitty poet instead of a shitty whateverIam. :)
DeleteYou do whateveryouare well. I left a well-funded, formerly well-written site, tried a couple of others that were fancier than yours, dropped by here and stayed for the writing. And I'm a little picky about writing. Since I've been here, you've missed one subjunctive that I've noticed and I'm an asshole about grammar and syntax. I guess you learned to write well by writing. And you have a lovely sense of the absurd, which is essential in Trump's America. You earn every comment you get by writing well and honestly. That's why I'm typing this shit here despite the Googs.
DeleteJohn
What? I missed a subjunctive? You just ruined my whole damned week.
DeleteDamn.
The above is exaggerated for comedic effect, but that's the way my head works. Is yours the same? All the nice words bounce right off like there's a force field surrounding me, but the subjunctive stabs me in the heart.
Thanks, though, seriously.
They used to call that culture. Not the museum kind of culture, but the norms and rules of interchange we generate trying to share air and space and sometimes ideas. I'm real tired of generations of people getting named (boomers, millenials, etc -- I don't know what the fuck they're talking about), but if everybody who was born had to reinvent literature and music and basic rules of human interchange, that's all they'd have time to do. For example, I want to have time to learn how to play tennis. I don't want to play tennis, but the time would be nice.
ReplyDeleteJohn
Oh, I like that... I'd like the time to study for a PhD in physics... because for me that would be decades.
DeleteI don't even know the names given to the various generations, it's all fictitious, but I do understand what "Gen X" is because I've worked with *THREE* people of that age who talked about it, often, as if it meant something.
Amazing poem in a crippling kind of way. Amazing comments, likewise. Thank you, everyone, I am but a flattened worm under your shoe.
ReplyDeleteI try so hard to avoid stepping on sidewalk worms after it rains. Frequently I bend over, pick 'em up, and toss 'em back onto the grass.
DeleteI'll give up if they're too slippery and I can't get a grip after a few tries, though. Ain't *fanatical* about it.
Oh, and with all this talk about society and entire nation states being beyond help. Whatever you believe about that stuff, don't use those beliefs as an excuse for not voting. Vote as if your life depended on it, because . . .
ReplyDeletejtb
Mathematically, of course, one vote makes so little difference it rounds off to zero. Except very rarely ,in some small-town election for precinct committeeperson, where somebody wins 22-21.
DeleteBut I don't say out loud any more, that one vote is futile, because a lot of votes really do make a difference, and if too many people see the mathematics and stop voting, it adds up to lots of votes and lost elections.
Like most of the things that don't stink about me, it's my wife who convinced me of the above, so of course I vote.
Always will, and everybody should.
And remember, every time you fill out a ballot and vote for a progressive Democrat or Independent, an angel of the lord descends from heaven and f*cks Donald Trump in the ass.
DeleteThe censors at Google/Blogger seem to be OK with f*cks and OK with *ss without asterisks, but they won't allow BOTH f*cks and *ass in the same comment, without asterisks .
DeleteThank you, Google, for keeping our corner of the world safe from f*cks and *sses.
Thanks for repairing my sacred comment. I guess I have my own ass t'risk. I appreciate your effort.
DeleteJohn
Sometimes I can see the comments Goodle/Blogger disallows. Sometimes I can't. When I can, I certainly try to make it right.
DeleteWish I could make it *WORK*.