Ben Bonkoske

Poet Without a Pen

Ben Bonkoske

  • repress, undress, rewrite, tonight

    I spend a lot of time in an office: World Headquarters – but spend most of my time in a sunken reading chair, reading, and more importantly, sitting on my fat ass. I am on the Vonnegut workout plan, which is, do pushups whenever you have creative stasis. I also have a mustache that I am very proud of and might someday actually deserve to bear (but by the time that I make that reconciliation, I will probably want to shave). In other words, I’m in spiritual debt. As usual. A great distraction and occupancy of 99% of my brain. OCD. Integrity. I laugh with myself, not at myself, but soon the laughter will quiet down and I will be left with little explanation for why I am such an underachievement. Fuck potential. A girl who graduated from high school in 2019 just published a book. Now I know how silly it is to claim to have written anything before you graduate from college. Trinity Lemm. Look her up. I look forward to reading from her before I die.

    It is best to read the best competition.

    Still, I agree that there is such thing as sacred idleness, but it is unhealthy for any poet, savant, writer, and thinker. I should take up drinking. At least then I would have a reason for doing nothing. The sauce of something elusive. I am like a hammer. I just stomp nails. I just try to force a square shape into a circle hole. If life becomes mundane there is no conflict to address. Thus, no reason to live. I am not a sadist, but I deeply believe that hardship is what makes great people. It is the difference between a boring conversation and one that has meaning. Perhaps there are shallow friends of mine that I enjoy their company, but it is the ones with difficulties defining their lives that I love. It is so much better to be in the shit with someone. And I, like a prince and cast away from society, writing in my basement, looking forward to tomorrow, writing poetry, running, bleh, I make myself sick. It is always easy to root for a success story, but more importantly, it is best to recognize a failure. Recognize why we still get up in the morning when we can’t face the mirror. Perhaps this is hell. Paradise.

    ,

  • run, rabbit

    Even I have become numb to my ramblings. They are occasionally insightful for my own behalf, but a rough couple thousand words later, I know nothing new, am doing nothing different, and have only depleted my sex drive to write, all the while more or less alienating an audience of 1. Perhaps it is time to move on, give up, accept that things would be better off without my little pleas to the galaxy that I am important, different, and audible. I took a nap today for christaske, and that, though slightly disheveling and out of the ordinary was the highlight. The most meaningful things in my life are dreams. If I am afraid to achieve them because nobody is listening, it may be disheartening to see that I am crazy. A tragic artist before I was formally published. I say I don’t care about such things but deep down I am embarrassed of everything I’ve written. Not that I don’t think it isn’t good, it’s not, it just is a great example of my hubris. I think of myself less often, and you the more. I enjoy my long walks but avoid the beach. I oddly have made a lot of friends on the tv screen.

    It is not the evenings, the end of my days that worry me, although stumbling upon one without much to my credit of accomplishments is daunting. It is everything in between the rise and the sun disappearing. Bland. Like unseasoned oatmeal. Oh, who am I kidding, even oatmeal with brown sugar is boring to me. I want chili’s for breakfast. I am a spice master a·fi·ci·o·na·do. It is the season to wear my olive sweater that I love every day. I shouldn’t excuse myself from reality, but I doubt it would have me. I have likened myself to a vampire more than once, but I worry the greatest similarity between us is that I am alone, dead inside, without blood to impress my loved ones. It just dawned on me that I am going to have to explain that I have done nothing with my life with my family at Thanksgiving. I suppose it is no worse than my manic episodes that I’ve incurred in the past. A broken down depleted streetcar named desire. I’ll try harder.

    It is a lifelong process – learning to live with oneself.

    ,

  • remagine

    I am so frustrated with incompetence. Yes, I think that if everybody in the world just listen to my ambivalent directions things would go swimmingly. I gave up on listening to Kanye. He doesn’t know what he is saying. I was the same way when I was unmedicated. I thought I could do a lot more than I should’ve and the result was mediocre. Perhaps I am bad at picking mentors because I saw someone I used to respect vote for Kanye West “because he thought he could chill with him.” This man is nearly 30. Kanye called himself “a baby” when he’s like 43. A part of me really wants to be more grounded in reality than becoming a distracting presidential candidate who compares himself to Deadpool and describes his perspective to MarioKart powerups. A word of advice, when you rely on God as your reasoning for why you should be president, you should think a little bit more about the position and what you plan on implementing, rather than the whole God thing. I’m religious, but privately. I’m at the point where I don’t believe in anything anymore. All hope is lost from the start. I am so easily manipulated into accepting what everyone tells me to believe. I take so much bad advice from people who don’t know any better than I do about what I want. I used to be so idealistic and I’ve been so beaten down I might as well be wearing lipstick. I wish I was there. I wish I hadn’t surrounded myself with a bunch of idiots.

    ,

  • response ability

    One piece of memorabilia that I lost when my life got flipped turned upside down was a black and white photograph of Hemingway working at a cluttered desk in his old age, petting a kitten. The man was married four times and basically shot himself with a shotgun, so I owe him some dignity. He was a symbol of my muse. I think I threw out an iPad in the same lucidity of 2019 and drank homemade green pea tea. I can’t believe 2020 is almost over, and yet 2019 seems so close as though it was yesterday. I mention all of this because there is a cat on my lap. I’m typing with my arms beneath the little bastard, stretching the flexibility of my hands as much as they will let me…And he’s gone. Ready to leave me with passive-aggressive glances and late-night moaning. The fate of America was televised tonight. I didn’t really take it seriously. It felt like a good sitcom. All that is was missing was laughter on cue, oohs and ahhs. There are a lot of things I would have done differently. I doubt any of the people who I hit in the crossfire of my growing pains read anything I need to say, but maybe the universe is listening. I still get embarrassed by old history. I thought about the time I went crazy and justified it that it happened when I was eighteen. The only thing is it lasted (and was ugly) four years after its initial intervention. But today I trusted myself and wasn’t let down left to my own devices. It wasn’t a perfect day (by Lou Reed’s standards), in fact, it was probably the worst day I’ve had in the unending trivialities I esteem for my routine. But I didn’t kiss a fag (British slang for all those wondering). There was a little apocalypse outside my window due to the spring air. I swear, it was just summer, fall was a week, winter breezed in, and now, the spring heat. It is sad when I think I have less than 80 winters left to bundle up for. That is, if five years of binging at college doesn’t kill me inevitably. Day sleeping used to be a hell of a drug that I revisited while I watched tv today. Doing nothing important until you get so bored you fall asleep. It doesn’t happen that often, since I believe, I’m better than I used to be. Or at least, boring as I should be.

    ,

  • R.E.S.P.E.C.T

    I remember as a little boy singing Aretha Franklin after I watched the Blues Brothers. I also remember needing a spelling lesson before I belted out her most iconic song. She has a lot of songs you lose yourself in. I’m filling my membrane up with Panic! At the Disco’s Discography just so I can check one more basic band off a recent journal’s (A little blue book started nearly two years ago) checklist of music to be familiar with before I die. My latest journal, a little black book, is overflowing at the seams and it has barely been four months since I started it. July, August, September, October. There have been roughly five nights I haven’t written in it. There is a lot of music I listen to that I’m not necessarily a fan of. I just think I owe it to myself, or the artist to give them a listen so I will know for sure how much I will hate someone’s vulnerability. I don’t see anybody be vulnerable these days. It is a bad game of hide and seek. I don’t even share my failures because that is what I have a journal for. Everything is failing. My nose wart is irritating me because I tried to pluck it off and instead it just bled. Now it is scabbing over and is more noticeable than it was yesterday. I don’t know, maybe I look at the wrong things in myself and other people. Growing up in Bucktown we used to visit Freakville (Wicker Park) and go to a place called Earwax Cafe. That was probably 15 years ago. Roughly the same time I bought my first vinyl. A Blues Brother’s record from Reckless Records. Now everything interesting, or alternative is overpopulated with people who think they know how to be punk. Even if on paper they have aspirations that outway my capacity, everybody is boring. I’ve grown used to expecting less of me. And it really doesn’t help anything. I don’t know why I should expect anything different from everybody different than me.

    ,

Ben Bonkoske is the author of two novels, Spoon in the Road, and Carolina, Colorado, California. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, Ten Zen by Ben, and Eleven Stories for 11:11. He lives in Chicago, where he likes to take walks.

B. A, M.A.T.