November 15, 2018
Share the Selfishness
Available elsewhere, and from Amazon:
“In elegantly-wrought laments of self-loathing and mean-spirited love poems, the author finds that he has more to say on already exhausted subjects, and gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will nevertheless automatically relate to and be entertained by. Tottenham has staked out a singular terrain where egotism and self-loathing meet, where futility merges with urgency, and beauty is created out of bitterness. If nothing else, he furnishes proof that a poet maudit can still, if not thrive, at least survive, alive and unwell, in this benighted age.”
– from the introduction, by Louis Pipe
October 24, 2018
Emptyscapes: Art Show
Lora Schlesinger Gallery
Bergamot Station, B5b: 2525 S.Michigan Ave, Santa Monica CA 90404
November 3 – December 15 2018
Opening reception: Nov 3rd 4-6pm
May 2, 2016
Inspired By True Events
I waited a long time
to become a failure.
It took longer than I expected.
Was it worth the wait?
Frankly, no.
It was all in the anticipation.
But it was nice to have something
to look forward to.
September 20, 2014
A Time Less Quality
I waited a long time
to be haunted
by what wasn’t wanted.
One experiences a different kind of nostalgia
when one doesn’t ‘change’.
Yet the question is still the same:
how best to squander
the rapidly diminishing time that remains.
March 23, 2014
CVI
Contact with anybody
who has produced work of quality
fills me with an air of thwarted yearning empathy,
an implausible sense of fraternity,
a melancholy sting. Regret and resentment
gnawing at me, eating me alive.
This is what you reap
when you haven’t sown anything.
November 7, 2013
Time Moves, But Not I
I am no stranger to waste, to bouts of tranquilizing
Self-abuse: drifting off with wilting rod in flowering fist.
Thoughts sliding like water across a pane of glass
And over the edge
Of the sofa and elsewhere. And tension detours
To parts unknown, on days that pass unknown;
Held together by dust,
By boredom and all its blossom.
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.
April 8, 2013
The Arrival
For years on end I have been sitting here,
impatiently awaiting potency: some explosive revelatory surge
that will carry me away and permit no looking back.
But this moment of deliverance has not arrived,
and I have done nothing to hasten it.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do anything.
In which case, I have succeeded admirably.
John Tottenham 