Well Bottom Blues

“Our job,“ said brother/Blaga, “is not to uncover it but to increase its mysteriousness.”

I am not a surrealist and it’s probably too late to try at 68, unless I start taking LSD and shrooms again and write while tripping in the way the lines sometimes erupt when I’m drunk and land as obsidian, but twisted in a different key by a dilated eye.

No, I’m too conventional: my careful, frequently accentual stanzas are trying to lift the lid on mystery in careful images, a vaguely Shakespearean rag of mostly impressionist, occasionally Pollocked, color, possible to condense into sense for an average citizen. Is that so wrong? To wish I was a poet in a land where poets are widely read? Instead of cable television America bulldozed by tiktok and the steady stream of twits, the purely intellectual stutter inside the free verse box. I have a lyric bent. Blame both Dylan’s.

I guess I’m just too old to do the wild ironic twist, as a friend with bionic hips discovered the day after the Beatles cover band played at the Maple Leaf while we waited to invoke the ghost of Maddox. Everette, who I never met, is closer kin, spit out by the South like me. Another clever fellow, also erudite but perfectly American, twisted images but not cryptic, fitted into postcards of sad eloquence.   I write in the in-between at the edge of America.

“The content that fills the flowing shapes/of my heart’s pure yearning is communal like the city.”

— quotes from the poem, pg. 313 of So Recently Rent a World.