Burning down to bones.

Back behind the machine, I worked into the poem. It had been awhile for me. The poem was a good animal. Faulkner had said that novelists were failed short story writers, and all short story writers were failed poets. Which was utter nonsense. Poets were filled with less longevity in form, and they concentrated more color into smaller spaces, and aside from a handful of them that moved me, I thought that most poets were terrible at it. I’d started out writing poems as a younger man, a child of that handful of poets, and Faulkner wasn’t one of them. As I became older and moved into more experience, the pages grew into stories, and they grew into novels. Now it was a trip back and forth between the two, but the poem was still important to me, it was the blood that ran beneath the veins of everything that I did behind the machine. The years of poems had built my base, and whatever grew from that toward the sky was only as strong as the feelings the poems gave me. I had hundreds of pages of poems on file, and maybe one day I would submit them, but maybe I wouldn’t. And there I thought about aphorisms, axioms, the priceless words of the greats , which always made me laugh a bit, because when a man does nothing but plays with words for a lifetime, he’s bound to come up with a few stones from the mud. Not to say that the words of great writers hadn’t put the world where it was, because they had. But the way people hung on the ideals of others just because they were reading them in print, it halted independent thought and went beyond reference, which is all information really is. For every wise sentence another person gave you, it was there as a stem for your own enhancement, or intelligent debate, not something to be lived by. All of this triggered a memory of a moment, in a bar in Portland, and I wrote it, about back in my early thirties, after I had quit smoking cigarettes –one, because I thought that it was a disgusting habit−and two, because I didn’t want to keep feeling like crap−and three, because I thought that it lacked grace. And it wasn’t hard to quit, they just tell you it is. But after I’d cut them out, I sat in a bar with a buddy of mine, who lit up and shook his head at me, and relied on a paraphrased dictum from Abraham Lincoln. He shot the smoke from his nostrils and looked at me arrogantly: “Every good man has a vice.” “No, every good man had a vice.” I sat there remembering, and let the words pour down the page in broadside, free from structure, and the old rush came back. The opaque blood that might have started to filter into the bloodstream was colored over again, just for good measure. But I wrote about the bar, my friend, who actually had a rare condition of being born without enamel on his teeth, and the gears engaged until the oil cycled through. I wrote a grip more, some about present day, some about Los Angeles. It was good to check in and feed the flames.