No One Has E-Mailed Yet!

I can't believe this blog hasn't taken off yet!  It should be soaring through the prevailing winds of cyberspace at this point, invading people's creative minds and conquering their empty souls!...

Haha.  What did I imagine this thing was supposed to be again?  I've only told my girlfriend that this exists, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't read this in a long time.  Partly because it hasn't been contributed to in forever; partly because she reads anything I've written well before it goes on here.

Well, she hasn't read any of this.

The Dream
by Matt Catania

Soul is known in the hole
the time it takes to travel
It's a crime to e inside my mind
Dreams do not unravel.

I thought myself a poet once
Arrogance, Ignorance bliss
I was so much cooler back then
When I knew what I'd do with this

But now the road ain't so clear
Traffic jacked up other minds
Some greater, some later discovered
Most are farther behind

The crux underneath my dilemma
Crutched weakly with wry foundation
Starry lenses stand on a glass fountain
Balance light of lilies and strangulation

Oh, where am I supposed to go now?
I'm years behind earning it
If I start now, how long do I wait
If only I knew, if it was worth it

Stay in stasis in statum oasis
Static and stoic, a stalwart complacence
Statuesque faces sleep in stone cases
What world I live within

An hones hope; mine is simple
enough.  And yet, so hard to believe
In screams filling still rooms to blank faces
Do they clap just to make me leave

If I write for simple, merely my soul
what affirmation do I need
from hollow eyes, empty faces
the heirs and heiresses of the crossroads

And the cheers, they may satisfy
if well wishes fuel the soul;
Boos, rejection are contemporaries
in the halls of the honored dead.

When I stand on stage
and I ask you a question
answer my question
don't applaud me for asking

Your cheer is the opposition 
to what I want the most.
Your lax is my arch rival
but keep the host

For my dream, my dream
to play one warm summer night
in front of a hundred thousand fans
in the park seduced by the city lights

I need you to love me just enough
to make it through one night.
There has to be enough of you
out there to make this work.

Right?  Love is not required
like I require in my life.
Who is the apportioner
of my wife?

Age has come, a coming of age
the age I've reached avails no coming
Fronting the stage, the stage is a front
for a coming of age aging ages in coming

Curtain closes on stage alone
Opportune fortune reaps the reeking
Blind to my backside the band keeps playing
Blasting, air brush, gain wreaking

Delay to the curtain displays an uncertain
relation made of tenuous plans
Lucky for we - we like to agree
we shadows held in shy hands

In high school I learned of vectors
rays, lines, line segments
At infinium is still conjecture
rays aren't always straight.

Rays of the Sun are never unified
yet not one complains of inefficiency.
We make music, diffuse, and grow mystified
why fans don't fawn at the food of the door.

I startle myself until my time comes
My mind will laps and dreams fall
from my blushing mind into my hand.
My greatest mistake was to suffer withdrawal.

Gold is a silly metaphor
in a state of lethal taste
this guy's too kind, he's a killer
with that skin-eating smile on his face

I would alter the deal of my dream
had I not run the others out
My mind is regressing so successfully
an inevitable basement of doubt

Counting heartbeats is not way to live
imagining my organs isn't either
Steeping in the dread of my squishy design
is causing a common fever



(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Charles Bukowski's Advice to Writing Students at EMU

For some reason I can't find the poem "Poetry Readings" by Bukowski in any of the books I have.  Here it is anyway, check it out.  After you read that, you can read this poem.  I love his view on poets and poetry readings, because I find them timeless and all but too relevant to me right now in this place.  If I ever had to do a poetry reading, I promise myself now I will read Poetry Readings first.

For now, I'll put another poem I found from him, that every student I have dealt with at this school should read.  It applies to all of them; in fact it probably applies to most of the staff at this college as well.  Another poem that directly applies to my life right now.

I'm not all knowing, but...
by Charles Bukowski

one of the problems is
that when most people
sit down to write a poem
the think,
"now I am going to write a 
poem"
and then they go on to write a poem
that
sounds like a poem or what they think
a poem should sound like.

this is one of their
problems.
of course, there are other 
problems:
those writers of poems 
that sound like poems
think that they then must
go around
reading them
to other people.

this, they say, is done
for status and recognition
(they are careful
not to mention
vanity
or the need for 
instantaneous
approbation
from some
sparse, addled
crowd).

the best poems
it seems to me
are written out of
an ultimate
need.
and once the poem is
written,
the only need
after that
is to write
another.

and the silence
of the printed page
is the
best response
to a finished
work.

in decades past
I once warned
some poet-friends
of mine
about the masturbatory
nature of poetry readings
done just
for the applause of
a handful of 
idiots.

"isolate yourself and
do your work and if you
must mix, then do it
with those who
have no interest at all
in what you consider
so
important."

such anger,
such a self-righteous
response
did I receive then
from my poet-friends 
that it seemed to me
that I had exactly 
proved my 
point.


after that,
we all drifted 
apart.


and that solved just
one of my
problems
and I suppose
just one of
theirs.