I don’t know where I’ve been, or what, exactly happened to me. Used to be all my words were poetry. Baudelaire said “make everything you write poetry, even your prose”, and I lived those words.
It wasn’t just my words. It was every part of me. All I had was want, and all I wanted was beauty.
Baudelaire also talked about the magic of words. The power. We’ve all got the power, but how are you using it? What worlds have you created? What wrongs have you righted? What of your love has conquered any of the hatred that’s blighted this place?
How much hate can you take? How much power you got just sittin’ there?
All it takes is some faith…
A couple weeks ago, on a chance whim, hanging with Jade, I hit Beats for Peace, a benefit for KPFT I resented benefitting. But I believe in fate. I was there for a reason: a poet so fiery, so powerful, his rapid fire words nailed somethin’ in me. Reminded me about our magic. Our power. My power.
How long has it been that I’ve been walking alone and weak?
Used to, I’d hit ultra hip poetry mics and slams weekdays in Austin, always staying too late to make class in the morning, but the worlds I’d see…
I heard Thom the World Poet, a guy who’d backpacked the world with nothing more than some pen and some paper and the kindness of strangers who believed even, just a little, in his poetry. Poetry was his life. And he lived off his poetry, crashing in kindness beds and eating scraps from the tables of those who simply respected him, even if they didn’t entirely believe.
How much respect you got just sitting there, wasted?
And I heard another man who limped from polio with stories that started “once, I’d been doing some Mescaline” who read fierce fever dreams that tore at the doors to every heaven. Terrible demons fleeing mankind’s cold, cold hell.
All it takes is some passion.
I remember this one open mic, volume too high, the top inflected vocal range ringing on the PA. Poet after poet after poet. Simple sonnets and landscape poems. Exuberant invectives, and sexual adjectives that made me cringe at the young woman’s frankness. And then the MC stands and calls up this disheveled looking man. I think when he walked he leaned to one side almost as if he’d spent his life leaning against fate’s gale-force winds.
And I say disheveled, but that doesn’t say much. Have you ever seen the underground literati terrorists stalking obscure Austin mid-week poetry open mics? They crave disheveled. They live disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare and faded, forest green button-up sweater is like a treasure, and they casually toss these things on like rich men disregardin’ expensive vodka in their drinks.
But this man was disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare man, faded youth and buttoned-up resolve. And he leaned when he walked, almost obsequious to a fault, as if he’d spent his life kneeling against fate’s cold gaze.
I can’t even remember his name.
But he had this friend. Some homeless man, just like him, if that’s what you call walking between squats in Boulder and Austin and back again year after year after year.
He rambled on about hittin’ the road. The cops in Dallas are assholes, and its a looong empty step through New Mexico and how back in the day they rode the trains unless the railroads kicked them off and then they just walked the tracks.
Thom the World Poet musta’ been proud.
He talked about his friend’d sing for change strumming an old beat up guitar. All the songs he wrote on all the roads he roamed.
It must be tough walking from Boulder and back. Let’s be honest. He didn’t have a name. Didn’t have a face. Didn’t have a job or a place of his own. No family to speak of and no friends, neither. His friends didn’t have the same names he didn’t. And when they find you keeled over in a squat, dead in West campus, you don’t get no funeral. No obituary. No ceremony.
His friend was dead and this was his friend’s eulogy.
Nameless read some Melville. Some Shakespeare. But you could tell he wasn’t supposed to be there. Here he was, a man without a life commandeering an open mic without a single self-centered, misspent word worshipping some golden idol called poetry. How dare he. A heathen choking back tearful blasphemes: words with purpose that slowly carved away at the hypocritical beats.
Man, the MC got nervous, signallin’ time, sure this intrusion wasn’t right. But Nameless just kept goin’. “Just one more quick thing”, a cast-off thread-bare voice, buttoned-up tears and a faded resolve. And he seemed weak when he talked, almost anxious as if he’d spent his life fearing fate’s cold, cold voice.
That night he sang a song his dead friend had written a while back, sittin’ on some sunny, summer, Texas sidewalk. And I can’t remember everything he sang, but he pulled out his harmonica and let loose an ooold blues riff and a cast-off thread-bare song, buttoned-up blues and a long faded pride, almost as if he’d spent his life singin’ to fate’s deaf ears:
My soul’s in hock,
My soul’s in hock,
Oh Lord, What I’m gonna do
when the interest comes due,
My soul’s in hock
Those words have power.
More power than any of the self-righteous crap that kept creeping up on that mic night after pointless night. More tuth than the useless manifestos shouted and applauded by the revolutionaries who’d never fight for anything more than their cast-off, thrift store, thread-bare and faded, forest green, button-up sweaters.
Soft-hearted liberals who never had enough change, never had enough time for Nameless and his eulogy, the last grasp at some sort of pride, some sort of honor in a world where the only place he could go to be heard was an obscure, Austin, mid-week, poetry open mic.
The MC intervened and moved Nameless off the stage.
The poets rustled up their bravado, paging through the shit they’d brought to read. The next guy droned out some misplaced homage to Emmerson or Thoreau: soulless nature poems from someone who didn’t have a soul. But at least he had a name.
And suddenly I’m wondering who it is I haven’t been listening to. And what words I’ve got with nothing to do. Thumbing through my Baudelaire wondering where all my power’s gone. Wondering what’s left that’s good. Lookin’ for words to give names to all those things we never, ever, acknowledge.