the rat : the writer

by Atti?

i theologized reincarnation
between adolescent angst
and a mid-life crises thirty years in the making
of a twenty year old canyon dweller
in the state
of mind that has been said by many to be
"grand, er"

i've constructed monuments of my own failure
on each side of this exit way;
while i feed the city of garbage where i play,
i'll keep throwing sour love songs
tangled in last nights leftover-
dones'
and wish i could see the sun
just once,
as if i'd even know what to do with it
other than close my eyes until
it was done;

then write some ambiguously coherent poem
that doesn't even end about it,
on the backside of a napkin,
who's backside grins with jovial idiocy,
who's for-side is a notebook,
who's backside is a tragic epilogue
regeneratively:

i am the rat
who packed all his belongings in to a poem,
and bothered to recycle for the sake
of a more conducive environment-

but i'm beginning to see more saturdays
in these rotten heaps,
than fridays to be their predecessors:
TGIF - yes, Thursday Goes Infinitely Forever
between misplaced clocks
in a lot of rusted suffix where the pre-fix
apparently,
is not.

trace my own circumference
until i walk a circle around my own misdirection,
trying to justify the end
of every poem i've thrown
into the construction of this second-hand home
-with out the means
to remember what it is i wrote.

i'm the trophy wife of beautiful words,

who can't even count to the sum
of his own accomplishments
without a second hand
-who can scribe for the first.

i've subscribed to my own literary magazine
of half concluded exposays-
from the first issue in Novemeber of 1988
up until the presently future day
-where again i'm writing the past
because i've already forgotten of today.

i know
i'll throw this issue away too
-help build a solid foundation for my adobe hut.
my own bullshit makes for the best mortar;
even if its backside starts to grow flowers,
and its for-side can cup a coward,
and its backside can be picked for hours
by its for-side's half-fully empty coward;

i make two cent's of every message in a bottle
i recycle after sending it adrift to myself.
i've lost it all and earned it back with every poem,
and chanced it every time again
in hope that it will always come back to me

in the very end.
.Or the very beginning
depending on where it starts..
.. or it's ending?

???