All I’ve done doesn’t amount to much physically. 1.3 pounds (or inches) of paper I think, but appearances aren’t everything. It’s all online nowadays. I hate this day in age. I commend anyone who can stay away from online gratification in all ways. Socially. Sexually. It’s all the same. Dopamine. I’m highly addicted to it but play it off like I’m just a used car dealer. God, how the boundaries were dissolved before 9 o’clock this morning. Fixing a fence, an unspoken hatred was uttered and I lost all respect for my acquaintance. I still acted like I liked him, and played along platonically. There are bad people of all races, he basically said, but you don’t need to be explicit about what you think of them or anyone for that matter. It is better to pretend to like everything, especially when you don’t amount to much anyway. I’m not one to care so much about social edict but justice is the same in all languages. I’m sore as hell, and my bones are breaking down for not enough calcium. I urked any movement after I snuck back into bed this afternoon. A poor rich man. Salad days are gone. Ode to Viceroy. I crumpled up the last smoke I’ll ever toke I hope. I don’t have a great structure to stand on. I’m like a wind-up clock that spins out of control and has a vampire for its owner. Sunlight betrays me, and I’d burrow deep into the cave of summer hibernation. No use trying, so I idly surrender to a better life, even if I’m not much of a sunshine to be around. At least I’m happy on the inside, which isn’t much but is enough. But on and on it goes and I am just one of the millions who don’t digest anything but crap and act like they’ve never sat on the toilet before and thought to themselves how disgusting their anatomy is. I break digital mirrors. A beautiful soul who is probably in trouble, that’s me. That’s all I’ll ever be. When I let my mind flow it usually goes somewhere discouraging, but lately, I haven’t had the time to do any thinking. My brain is too congested with new goals, smothered by smokey the bear. What is worst is when your best isn’t efficiently effective to cut the pie. My body hasn’t ached in this way since I hiked the Appalachian Trail so at least you know what I mean when I say, It is better than anything, to forgive yourself for not pitying itself.
Poet Without a Pen
Ben Bonkoske
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humble tumblr
I am failing in the right direction. An aging singer good at manual labor. I can sit for ten minutes without thinking of anything. Meditation is a mandatory prescription I have learned to live with. Other things I haven’t been able to be complacent with. Everything is so clear and neat I could tie a knot into a little bowtie that would rise to the occasion to write my life off as an alibi. I talk to inanimate things and let them guide my destiny, just don’t tell anybody. I’m hiding something. I don’t have time to think of myself but I’m still anxious about something. Everyone else. People would be surprised by my little wise wit and lies that get them through the week in an office. Life is a beautiful detention looking out the window due to a thing called work. A good loving sweat after a day’s work makes it worth it to leave something on earth when it is time for me to go to heaven. I’ll visit hell on the weekends with the rest of my friends. I worry I will make poor decisions my whole life with them, but when I am alone, I can condone the rest of my behavior. Or at least, I think I can. I am still a basketcase but at least I have finally started something worth reading. An autobiography? I hope you don’t think I intend to have children with everything that is wrong with me. I don’t have time for such frivolities or the money. But I like babies. They make me smile and giggle when they wiggle their arms, legs, and toes and noses. I am still in the beginning of the discovery of my trauma. It is like soiled milk in my stomach and brain. Talk to Freud. He would be disappointed but impressed at the same time. I think the entirety of what he preached was a disappointment to even him. Why are we so quick to accept one mad man’s theory as the basis of the entirety of a field, subject, or the philosophy of the human brain. Perhaps someday my poetry will be in a museum. I’d just be happy if one person read it. It just depends on who. Nothing changes day by day, but then all of a sudden, life emerges from the crowd, and the next thing you know it is a splendid dinner party*. I am starting to get the feeling that my first novel is unreadable no matter how good I’ve heard it is. Something is off-color about it and makes people uncomfortable. At least it has one memorable moment. Hopefully, people will understand that sadness, and pain is often funny. It makes for a good awkward intimacy.Sneeze* -
Harmony Korine
Sparks fly on this quiet day waiting for July. That is a lie. I’d rather die than try. No less, I try but nothing ever seems to materialize. My productivity is a good cry. I can feel the rains of spring boiling at my eyelids but I just hold it in. I’m worse than the epitome of infidelity. Is it possible to be out of touch today, when the world is looking at you on a touch screen? My social life has never been afflicted by my reclusion but I really miss having a partner in crime. You. can’t build a life on broken trust and I couldn’t even be smart enough to listen to my worst nightmares. I’m heading into a collision with a drunk driver. Two brains are smarter than this one. Life is so much easier with a friend. Someone to combat loneliness and bounce ideas off of. I would love to be told I’m stupid at this point so at least I would know what to do about it. Instead, here I lay dying.I think I am a self-sufficient dependent person and that is why this isolation is making me so hung up to dry. It is quiet here alone. We used to scream at one another through the phone. One of my legs is broken, oh no. In one week, I’ve become a festering pig after all my progress getting back on my two feet. My fingertips or neurons have creative tendencies that lead nowhere quick. I don’t know why but a typewriter connects me with my inner beast in a different way than the soft slow retelling of a day that the pencil unleashes. I am at ease that anything will be worth seeing. I can barely close my eyes at night, but I wake up for the morning. My thoughts speed, and I am greedy with my language in an orgy of engagement – even if it’s just me. The news is boring but we all seem to see what’s happening. Somedays I think I have a six-foot-tall bunny telling ME what to do. I have a beautiful imagination, but so does everybody. I shouldn’t expect a break for nothing. -
Humillity
My self-esteem is in the gutter. None of my achievements are worth being proud of. Even when I hear the news that somebody read my book, a pain inside me resurfaces. Other books are best sellers because they took out the scenes that embarrassed them. Not me. I just quietly published for no reputable reason. I didn’t even try to sell it, and that is what I am most proud of. I didn’t write it for money. It should be burned for its honesty… And here I am ready to sell out. All I think of when I look at those pages are tears that should have never been shed for my experiment. It’s unfair, I got what I wanted which was nothing what I expected.I was doing so well, so happy and isolated from what I imagine everybody to be achieving in their spare time. Then I remember. All I can do is write poetry. I really don’t have that much going for me and the days are getting shorter and lonelier. I wish I knew what to go back to school for. Once again, it is a question of happiness and everything else.Listen, to others I hear the demons say. But my heart cries out like a spoiled child and I can’t seem to do anything. But I do, I listen to everybody because I can’t hear myself think. I hate waking up. I hate sleeping. I hate everything. It is just not going my way and I should start getting used to it because I’d bet this is as easy as it will ever be. I have no future, no hope, no desire to do the things everybody tells me I should feel some sort of empathy for. I don’t enjoy art unless it is prestigiously pretentious and I’d probably be mean to any children even if they offered me candy. I’m a fat, over-organized lout. Worst of all, unhappy with everything. My expectations would scare away anybody.I talked with my two best friends yesterday for nearly two hours and all I can remember is blushing that to the fact that they are both on unemployment and ten steps ahead of me in every other outlet. I haven’t heard their art in ages. I told them I had different values than a place of my own and tried to overlook that I still live with daddy at 23. It felt awful even though I know they would love me if I was homeless. It was just hard to see myself compromised even after all I’ve been through, it’s no excuse. People don’t care and are very good at judgments. I felt and looked like a runt.For as much as I whine, I might say that I’m on time. I know there is a plan for me, but I am lost in a fog that is only getting thicker, and frankly, I’m getting sicker. Good luck, they all say, but that is never a good thing to hear, it makes me fear the worst. Tomorrow will be just like today. -
Hopeful Horror
You can be as good of a writer from day one as you will be when you die. What is next on the line is often defined by time, and like an expensive wine, it adds taste and pleasure with age. The more I look back at my early work, the less reserved I am, and willing to say what is really in my heart and mind. A sure sign of a poet. Now, it seems like an ugly competition that I feel no joy fighting with. A posture posing with all of my clothes on. No fun. At least when we fight there is a rush to believing what we are fighting for is right, even when it’s over something stupid. It is very common in my life, wasting a lot of energy on stupidity. It wasn’t until I went back to the busy life of my childhood bedroom that I saw just how cluttered even my sharpest attention span really leaves me with. Fragments of a bewildered, scared and stupid idiosyncrasy. It’s like getting better at typing on a typewriter or taking film pictures, it’s outdated but has become more valid in its own meaning. Art for Art. Love for Love. And yes, Life for Death.When I’m really depressed I laugh at Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide letter.The Football game is over.No more games.No more fun.It reminds me that I am young and have so much time before I decide to kick the bucket. I laugh to myself sardonically with a twinge of sanguine. I grapple with the contention that if a person is marked by suicide does it make their words that much more significant? I don’t understand why we are so attracted to the ones who kill themselves. Maybe it is the amount of control they have over their lives, in all, even death. I imagine them all to be out of control is the real sad paradoxic. Maybe I’ll be so happy one day I’ll just kill myself. And I’ll want is people to be happy for me that I thought highly enough about myself that all my literature would be recognized by a lurid distinction. I don’t want to tell people that a trigger warning is necessary. I want them to feel those emotions they bottle up inside. I think the things that scare us should be celebrated instead of overlooked. I’m cooked. I promise you, someday, people will hate me for my words.I thought about a poem I heard over five years ago today when it finally applied to me.What happens when there is nothing left to catch the flame.To me, it’s relationship advice. I never liked the poet who wrote it as a person but we don’t have to admire an artist to admit that they are capable of making us feel even the most intimate of emotions. We often don’t want to admit to ourselves the depth of their cut when it’s someone we dislike. Sometimes being pretentious is deserved. I think we are all just getting worse. It is time to get over it, but for each regret, I have a new incantation that allows me to forget.
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.
Ben Bonkoske 