This is a poem I wrote in 2001.
god damn this boredom. that is one attractive girl over there. she looks so suspicious. it would be wise to remain wary of her. yet, it feels awfully good to keep staring. i’m starting to find rat faces and mousy hair really attractive. okay, rat face isn’t really fair of me; it’s just that she has a really spectacular overbite. hell, i almost threw my desk across the room when she walked in sporting that cleavage. she must have seen something in my face for she has donned a sweater. god damn this boredom. that single green vein running up or down her right breast reminds me of that girl i used to hover over in high school with the same fashion sense. she seemed wealthy and was big-mouthed gorgeous. i really miss those sinful mouths. i ran into her at a quaint family restaurant on my step-brother’s birthday. it was a few years after graduation and she looked more wealthy, more tan, longer hair, and somehow mediterranean. she remembered me and she was very nice. i was surprised like when you are surprised when famous people are nice. that was the same night my step-uncle took out my step-brother’s new gun and began to test its action in the middle of dinner. my entire family began whisper-shouting at him to put the gun away. shit. she knows i’m staring. god damn her darting eyes. she knows about the temptation to play kung-fu with my fingers. hi-yah. i’m sure she knows about my caffeine as well. ra cha cha. i am obsessed with staring. the world is smaller now that i have this new prescription and for the first time, i can really see. that is definitely cat hair on that dude’s back. thanks for the details. they are lovely. i keep forgetting these aren’t sunglasses and i am constantly getting caught staring into people’s faces. they all know. i hope i am unsettling to most people. it is definitely something to do. okay, the whole candy thing is getting old girls. the two lesbians to my right are participating in the daily candy exchange and it is driving me out of my fucking mind. i have to admit that i am generalizing: only one of them seems to be completely gay. the other might be bi or hell, perhaps she’s straight as a board. one thing is clear, the gay one is completely in love with the other even though the other wants nothing to do with her outside of candy. they take me completely seriously and have no sense of irony. once i found a box of lesbian love letters in the dumpster and went through the whole thing. the box was decorated with flowers on the outside and lined with red felt on the inside. the letters themselves were an amazingly sweet group. the most overtly sexual remark i could find was: “last night was wonderful, you sure are an expert with your hands.” other than that, it was a nice bland romance. their story was a simple thing: they fell in love, lived together, broke up, and then somebody moved out. it seems so trite from my position. snobbery. god damn it all. i want to leave town and write some songs about autumn. wow, i could really get there from here. if you lived here you would know how sick we are of everything familiar to us. we are always waiting for any change, no matter how subtle. congratulations. congratulations. winter is neat. sure it is. what do you mean you don’t have any good winter clothing? this is like a festival for us. forget christmas, we’ve got a couple of weeks to celebrate. if we lived up by you, we could party year round. can you feel it. no? well, it’s there. normally, i would know what’s going on or have some sense in the matters you’re discussing but i’m too busy thinking about getting paid for my dreams. i mean i am working all night. nothing special, but i am definitely more active at night. i need a raise, a company car, and some frequent flyer miles. we travel all night long and wake up. what about it? they’re getting worse, you know. the whole dog plot was complicated and he is no connoisseur. seriously, who do you trust? the german shepherds or the rottweilers. precision or brute force? precision, obviously. i suppose the terror finally got to me as well. our house got bombed. luckily, it was a dud but it did some severe structural damage to our home. we were losing sleep and missing meals while worrying about the house falling on us. these are really good times for getting your head together. i am obsessed with staring and video-taping everything. record the whole thing and edit later. honestly, i don’t feel like i am doing any damage or helping either. i just record. hey, you with the overbite, let’s escape to the city tonight and not from it. we’ll go to a party and take some blurry pictures. we’ll put our hand over the flash and purposely wreck all of our memories. we’ll all tamper with his visual experience. i am through struggling with the importance of presenting his visual experience as i see it. describe his visual experience in lonely terms of really high skies at night. the world is bigger at night. darkness implies space. his aural experience is gaining momentum as well. it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t love sound. he listens to the music that his parents think his music sounds like. he only wants the music that makes your eyes unfocus. the kind that is like dozing off behind the steering wheel during a car wash and dreaming that you are driving on the ocean floor. the urge to become a radio dj comes and goes. i could really get into and possibly get lost in the subculture of parody songs. after being locked in small spaces in the early morning year after year, all that shit must seem funny as hell. the most important drawback of radio work is the fact that no one is listening. i don’t imagine that those applause are real. the bravoes seem a bit much, but i suppose it’s possible. with any luck, he’ll be deaf and blind in a year. i can only hope that it will all be worth it but these are the limits of representation. if you stay a child forever then what the hell do you regress to in the end? adulthood? no that’s too dick. maybe you should regress to or just gress to puberty. go out with a bang. that sounds fun. oh, to have something to look forward to. thanks to my mom, i have all this enthusiasm and most of the time it isn’t about anything. i feel sorry for the people who have to deal with me after i seem like i just smoked a pound of crack. i don’t have the capacity for this doing this right. my advice: pick a picture which best captures you as you want to be seen, not as you actually are. this burns your high school to the ground. yes, these actions make you so successful. do them and all will be good. but all the while, be over it. i am over it. you are over it. he is over it and i pray nightly that she is not over it just yet. just one more night. “i mean, i kind of wanted to sleep with you eventually, but that night, i was just really feeling sorry for you.” i keep remembering all these passing cruelties in our youth. there were all these soul-crushing truths that we caught a fleeting glimpse of and although they were terrible, we were never given a taste of the more horrible things at work. none of it really gets examined thoroughly until years later. you spend all this time discovering things about yourself that you hate and getting over them. it isn’t too hard to learn to get over them but the process never stops. there is always something that you did that will make you sick one day. you find yourself praying that no one will ever die until you can show them that you can pull your head out of your ass. do you remember the dreariness of waiting for the bus every morning? the only noticeable diversions that happened in all those years were the time changes. every day your mind begins to wander towards cruelty. you push people to see how far they will let you get away with it. for instance, what is a “slut”? i’m so sorry. there are some people who are on a dangerous course for reasons they can’t see and there are those who can’t settle. neither are “sluts”. the “slut” of our high school hit on me for weeks one year. i really got off on it, but made fun of her behind her back and sometimes to her face. eventually, she snapped and had a guy call me at home and threaten me physically. i backed off and never spoke ill of her again. the whole thing makes me fucking sick. he she we it them us i is are am a “slut”. how bad do you want to get back at those evil people that you let walk all over you? how bad do you want to get back at me? it is not numbers that matter. keep moving and go where you need to go but try not to destroy yourself along the way. also, try and remember how people are when you walk away from them. no two are alike, at least from my experience. there is nothing wrong with slowing your blood down. he is through judging and so am i. all my judgments. i hated being one of those charitable people who screws over his women and still walks around wearing the “nicest guy” disguise. when something bad happens to people like that, their whole world comes to an end. they never get a chance to say: “i failed you. no, it’s okay. i’m not being sarcastic. i failed you. despite all the things we talked about, i am the people that we agreed that we hate. you’re not a sellout like me but you’re still a piece of shit in your own way. no, let me rephrase that: whenever i see you or think about me with you, i want to blow my fucking brains out.” i think progress is being able to think about wanting to blow your brains instead of wanting to blow your brains out. i have been blowing my brains out for six years. i’ll get over it. high school is over but what about the christmas lights in a girl’s bedroom? some risky ventures. some good moments in bad weather. he regrets not taking the opportunity to say: “you have this incredible gift for making me lonely when i am sitting right beside you. maybe you should see someone professional about that.” today was different. completely empty blue sky almost. there was one big cloud raining on the right side of the library as bright gray as the sky is blue. it was a drizzle mainly. a sun shower. i was worried about this notebook. continue checking alternate weather channels until you find the conditions you want for the day. real synthesis. precision and perfection are real here. imagine your idea of perfection. go ahead. picture perfection in your mind. go ahead. it is the same as mine. i will place a number of scenarios in front of you. raise your hand if one of them is you. god bless the comedian that got stuck doing his worst character his entire life for the money and god bless the left hand of your favorite drummer. thanks history, everyone around here is the same but worse. there are two choices available today: get an ulcer from worry or sleep sitting up. the only comfort i get is from a radio commercial. the one where you get a free box of steaks for every windshield repair. i tried so hard to not be of the world, but instead to be of palm beach county. he is not impressed and judges. every observation he makes. this is his private snobbery and my theories about him are snobbery as well. he is afraid of being one of those people who makes friends just so that he will have someone to be an asshole to. his costume jewelry. i am the champion of something. they got this girl for me. she is so light and so fair. she says she’s holy and can’t do it, but does everything else, if i know what she means. she is my reward when i win. with this knowledge, i can barely sleep. the following morning, the kitchen is overrun with ants. there are small ants linked up with bee ants and the gaps are filled with batteries to keep the current. they are on me and i started screaming. oh, what i will do for the affection of fake people or real fake people. who is rewarded that way? who runs so fast all night to find her? i do, all night. “i had a good, no, a great dream about you and your body was perfect in every way. i really should not be mentioning this. this is fake.” through suburbia. always running through comfortable streets for her. deep down, no journey difficult. through dawn and through night. the car was european with a mattress for the passenger seat. i laid on it with my dozing eyes on the road lit by streetlights and old shops while my friend did all the driving. montana sure is big up and down. the time i spent there as a child, i spent running from gnats and caterpillars. the time i spent there as a teenager, i kept my eye out and up unfocused and slept under the stars one night on my distant cousin’s trampoline. we took a trip together through the hills to a waterfall. i filled a bottle with water and dirt for my girlfriend back home who i hated. i wanted to cheat on her with the “slutty” girl i had met on the plane so that i could stall the feeling that i was wasting my time on my girl back home. we visited my dad’s grave which was a white card in clear plastic on a green plastic stick in the ground beside my grandmother who i have no memories of. my uncle who is there now told me that my father’s ashes were there. i was skeptical for i knew dad wasn’t there, ashes or no. the sun was setting on the cemetary and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. the groundskeeper was coming to kick us out, so i took a picture of an owl looking at us and we left. rock climbing with the boys in georgia. we never climbed higher than the trees and the light was always partial from the leaves and what not. we played war on the flat rocks. we played war and when two of us died, we climbed higher than the survivor and watched him as angels. we discussed our lives and the fate of our comrade, who still had the rest of his life to lead without us. we played until dinnertime and went home always in trouble. my poor mother must have had terrible visions of me falling headfirst down the waterfall. the waterfall where we threw my friend’s little brother’s bike off the top. it was a tiny stream, the bottom of which was red and tan clay. the waterfall itself wasn’t terribly impressive (only a story or two) and the small pond at the bottom of it was opaque with mud and clay. the hills of georgia. if it’s not rock, then it’s clay with pine needles on everything in various stages of decay. the only weather in georgia is two days of snow, a heat wave, and the rest of the year is autumn. those girls are trading candy again. on fall evenings, the smell from the papermill was so unique that he still can’t believe that anyone but him knows it. he snuck into his parents’ room around five in the morning. the room was partially lit by the slivers of amber-tinted light coming through the closed venetian blinds. he listened to their breathing to determine how deeply asleep they were. confident that they would not be disturbed by his presence (but wary just the same), he sunk down on all fours and crawled stealthily towards the foot of their bed. he continually slowed his movements in order to remain absolutely inaudible. this took an incredible amount of patience for a boy who was only a week shy of his tenth birthday. he knew his dad would kick him out of the room if he found him there. he didn’t want to get into bed with them, just lay at the foot. it was the most comfortable spot in the entire house due to the collection of extra pillows and blankets his parents left there each night. with the nightmare that had driven him there completely forgotten, he wrapped himself in all the unused covers and rested his head on a pillow tucked halfway underneath the bed. he heard the air conditioner kick in and began to doze off slowly as comfortable and content as anyone in the world could be. jumpy not sleepy all day and into the night. the humidity here makes nighttime into a presence. night is a person here. overlapping everything and trying to write as small as possible. who here isn’t tired of feeling stupid? he is so tired of feeling stupid. be honest and feel stupid. he’s lucky. she’s lucky. we’re all lucky. i’m getting deliberate in all and ditching my urge to rush anything. i’m using deliberation in everything and leaving nothing to chance. i am executing deliberative actions in every aspect and doing away with haste entirely. if i could draw an overcast day for you him he i would believe us him you i he we them would. completely overcast, light rain, light breeze, forty-seven degrees. i keep walking looking up at the birds but i want to stop and slow my blood down. if i break a sweat in this weather, on this perfect day, i will fuck somebody up, i swear. i don’t have the capacity for doing this right. i wish the fucking moon was fucking full and had that fucking ring around it. my kindness expired. cruelty contest tonight. i hope i can win it. he doesn’t think he can stomach anymore kindness. i him her he she we them it us me you. i sure do like what i’m listening to. this music is romantic and i am in love for music music i take pictures of drums. who wants to play all those imaginary songs and get lost in the last nightclub you remember? he does i you do. he needs help to clamp his eyes shut against the strobes and torn movie screens in clubs all over town. so small and big and invisible. his visual experience. his aural experience. his touch experience? but not smell or taste, fuck that. hold nose cover mouth experience. he must learn to stop talking at people. he insists that no one touch him. his costume jewelry. talk at someone until you learn to listen. have to ask for everything. am tired of asking permission for everything. my instincts are to follow you everywhere. i’ll betray that for good. you were someone i used to tell secrets to. now it’s all lies. well. i don’t believe your stories. why? they’re not that good. i’m afraid i don’t believe that one either. why? it’s too good. you don’t trust anyone. want to hear more? draw me screaming. finally, we can return to the personalities they gave us. let’s make some mistakes today. you used to be so playful. you’re one of those people who really milks the sympathy and enjoys your allergies. i can’t look at you. it is so ugly to feel your presence. is it all right for me to slow your blood down? rub ink into those wounds? i am through struggling with his visual experience. my plan was to complete his experience. complete his experience. complete his experience. his experience complete. complete experience his. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete experience. his complete
All of the written works presented on these pages are copyrighted by Richard Glenn Schmidt-2002.
