This art tickle is not entirely about John Waters…
June 25, 2019
Agents Of Misfortune
December 23, 2017
The One
I am the one
waiting for the One.
I have never entered a room
without hoping that the One
I am waiting for
might be found there.
Despite decades of disappointment,
I still look for her in every face,
looking for somebody to become that place
where everything that falls apart
falls into place.
But if I found her, I wouldn’t want her,
for as long as the possibility
of somebody else wanting me exists,
I will always want somebody else.
And I realize now that if she ever does arrive
it will not be in the prime of either of our lives,
at a cocktail party with a drink in her hand,
but that she is more likely to arrive holding a bedpan
as I am breathing my last in a hospital bed.
Only then, with restlessness and hope extinguished,
and all other options exhausted,
will I finally be ready
for the One.
March 15, 2016
A Life’s Work
And so, lost to myself, I find myself again, incapable of losing myself, in a state unfit for discharging what I stubbornly and unconvincingly still cling to the notion of as being my duty, weighed down by the forces that were supposed to raise me, sinking into a lyre-backed chair amid the flickerings and trillings of a hot February morning. Despite the best of intentions, things didn’t go according to plan. A few sentences were squeezed out like the rancid dregs from an almost empty bottle, long past its expiration date. The results, when viewed, will probably strike me as nothing I’d care to share. But at least a few lines emerged.
August 21, 2013
X
Out of all the things
I could have done on this day,
that might have been fun, edifying
or charitable, I have chosen instead
to sink somewhere in flustered haze.
As if anything might be salvaged
from these uselessly plumbed depths.
May 5, 2013
Patronage of Negation
I am constantly confronted by other people’s works
that I could have created myself.
And I am constantly disappointed by them.
Sadly, I have to recognize them
for what they are: inferior versions
of what I could have done
if I’d been insecure enough in my abilities
to do anything.
February 19, 2013
Antiepithalamia III
A sudden deadness
accompanies satisfaction,
and nothing else
satisfies.
John Tottenham 