Hey

I have a new book out, Freak Show, from Fernwood Press. Those folks know how to put together a book. They even made my poems look legitimate. Anyway, if you have any interest, here’s a link:

https://www.amazon.com/Freak-Show-Casey-Killingsworth/dp/1594981302

My father no longer worries about water

___________________________________

 Sure, I watch those videos of bush planes 

landing in the outback, gliding over islands

filled clear up with trees, ready to land and

build cabins, and it looks appealing, I can’t

lie.

 But I like people, like them in spite of how

they treat each other sometimes, I like how

we can have those moments of sweetness,

how even when we’re mad at others

we can resort to people to calm us. 

My father lived in the mountains, dreamed

about it and then did it. And then worried

about water, if there was going to be enough

for the plants and trees, going to be enough 

to fend off forest fires. No water was the

enemy.

So here’s what I’d do if I were you. Don’t

go to the mountains, don’t fly in to your very

own forested island to escape all the people.

Instead come to dinner with us, tell us your

stories and we will tell you ours, talk and 

laugh with us. Try not to worry about water.

Say me a poem

When my father returned home to rural Arkansas after becoming the first in his family to go to college, his uncle, a logger who had little opportunity in academic places, asked my father to “say me a poem” because he assumed the college-educated learned to understand and recite poems. In some respects it’s too bad he was mistaken.

So, for my great-uncle, I’m saying you a poem….

 On that day of definitive illumination

______________________________________

Someday when the world is truly revealed,

long after we’re gone, I suppose,

the real day, not what we call discovery now,

on that day when all questions cease

I hope that we find that wearing Groucho Marx

glasses cured cancer, and after all those

studies about how to treat each other maybe all

we had to do was be nice, to everyone; that’s it: 

be nice, no excuses.

I hope that eating two candy bars every day

helped end global warming and that 

walking carelessly actually did injure

your mother’s back, and there was always

someone steering a chariot across the sky,

dragging a sun bigger than my imagination.

But my biggest hope is that making 12 

free throws in a row, then closing your eyes 

and wishing for requited teenage love, 

I hope that wasn’t a thing because I can’t 

tell you how many times I made eleven.

This poem came out the way I wanted it to, which is to say I felt it was done when I put my pen down (okay, nobody puts pens down anymore so let’s say I turned off the computer). It felt finished.

I had two goals for the poem. The first was to admit that I don’t really have a clue how the world truly operates and I’m guessing maybe nobody does if they’re honest. But the second goal, for me, was even more important, and that was the recognition of how hard it is to navigate through that world where we don’t know the answers. So maybe making twelve free throws might have netted me a girlfriend in high school? That’s the question.

Click on the busted hammer to see some links to some of my poems that have found homes somewhere.

What I like about someone else’s poem:

Glass

by Kim Addonizio

In every bar there’s someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed
by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him,
a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark
inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone.
Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him.
And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles,
the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue
nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining,
toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker
signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up
with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt
and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood,
a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole
world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world
at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex,
just a blessed peace that seems final but isn’t. And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?
Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything
but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people
they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty,
against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar
with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well?
Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying;
Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something,
come close I want to whisper it, to pour
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you,
listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober,
while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass,
while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay,
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop,
I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.

“Glass” by Kim Addonizio, Tell Me, BOA Editions Ltd.

This is one of my favorite poems ever. But why? How does this poem distinguish itself from the bazillions of other poems out there and grab me by the stanza? What’s in here?

For one thing, I think the delivery is sublime. This poem is offered in the most straightforward way with no pretense and no previous understanding of the situation necessary. Of course, like most great poems this one comes to us—at us—in deep waves so it’s worth it to keep going back to discover more ways the poet tries to drown us with her message.

But it doesn’t need an instruction book. This poem is about loneliness, abject loneliness, and we don’t need an interpreter for that. We already know this language. We all know this language. It’s every language. This is nothing more than the script of all of our lives and Addonizio displays it to us with perfect words and phrases.

We know about loneliness ourselves but we forget, and the poet is not going to let us get away with it; she’s going to deliver this message in a way we cannot escape.

Consider the line “Now the relatives are floating up with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt and a little laughter, too…” Raise your hand if this doesn’t apply to you. That’s what I thought.

So great.