Letters to a Young Idiot.

When is it too late to say "When I grow up," or "When I'm older, I'm going to..." I'll tell you when, now. Don't say "I'm going to be a writer in a few years" if you're trying to be a writer now. In fact, you can consider yourself a writer if you have been published somewhere reputable. 

       If you still don't believe me, here is some great advice you probably will not take. Fake it. If you don't feign your own confidence then no one else will believe in you. Your writing may be a big pile of horse shit sprinkled with raccoon barf, but if you sell your words, they might seem better. It's called illusion people, illusion. 

(Self, Why did you give up a future of comfort for your "gift"? Because a gift can turn very quickly into a burden when you assume that everything will work out just because it should. Blind hope means you end up a broke artist. Is this sounding familiar, my honey child?)

All of this self-loathing has just been provoked by getting rejected from Boston Review. Usually it takes so long to hear form a literary magazine that I don't care if I get rejected. I just want to hear back from them, but this time I sent BR my absolute best poetry.

I look around me and the world seems to be surrounded by people who make good career choices. What on earth was I thinking? I was under the impressions that my poetry had good raw, potential.

Which brings me to my next thought: If one of your students is just a mediocre writer, for god sakes tell them (because the mediocre ones are the students who never make it): otherwise, they will think they're good, and not all the pretending in the world will convince their reader otherwise. 

Ohio fills me with nostalgia and regret because I get to come home and wallow in the success of my other family members. Here's a recent poem that I am only putting up for short time. It's unfinished, but gave me a little hope. 

untitled.

City, throw your chaos up at me through the blue pane of evening:

The ambulance, the fire truck, the drunks, and the youth

screaming their urgent shrills in the streets.

i am empty-awake and listening with patience and intrigue

the way a wall waits to greet the sun bearing her orange hair

then bows as the darkness sucks her out through his coarse skin.

i love the sound of resistance at 2am, of nature.

How violent it is just to be alive.

i cut my finger with a pairing knife, and it opens

faster than a potato. i smell like fear and ephemerality

because i know what will become of me 

if i were to bleed out my little liquid life--

the same end that becomes of an onion of radish--

dirt and muffled sunlight.

An ice cream truck wails off key, longing to be hailed,

and i press a towel into my thumb, thirsty to have no entrances

Somewhere else in a crack-walled apartment,

someone must be nursing a wound much more monumental--

dying, even, clutching the swelling veins in her neck,

cursing the sirens as the very last sound she will hear

while the traffic below bustles until morning.