"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
William Blake
"Publishing poetry is like dropping rose petals down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo."
Don Marquis
Dear Professor
you ask me why I left behind
my academic life my degree
my literary modicum
for a black Stratocaster guitar
five years of nothing but nights
a thatch of orange hair with golden streaks
so that I could wear my dress all the way
up to the crack of my ass
line my eyes in charcoal and green goo
to try to sing
get propositioned by eighteen-year-old squirts
five inches shorter than me
get pinched by ageing salesmen four martinis gone
get ice cubes dropped down my back
by overweight girls
all smudged eyeliner and baggy jeans
Poptart they sneer and look at my fishnets
which are ripped to hell from changing in the van
and then jumping off the back with
a bag of cords kleenex duct tape extra strings
so that I could eat beer nuts for dinner
and screwdrivers for brunch
throw up five times in a broken john with a broken door
while the other girls stand outside
waiting to get a look in the cracked mirror
so that I could rattle roll and shake
waking up in the backseat of the Mustang
on the way back to the Budget-el
my head still buzzing with feedback
and the screams of our manager who heard me
all too clearly drop three chords
in I'm Not Your Stepping Stone
a song that only has four chords altogether
so that on nights when Susan is on-beat
and Cathy comes in perfectly on the chorus harmony
and Debbie isn't shouting that she can't hear herself
and Margie keeps on playing even when she looks up
and suddenly realizes that five hundred people
are staring right at her
and I manage to smile and nod and begin to jump
up and down until I can't stop
even after they pull the plug on us
like the day we were on tv in my hometown
and all I could think of was
that everyone I ever hated in high school
was watching me from their familyrooms
surrounded by bowling trophies and their daughters'
Barbie's Dream Houses
only the next night
to scream myself raw to be heard over the cheap p.a.
at a bar gig no stage no lights no dressingroom
Debbie shrieking We are headliners! Where is our
private crapper?
while the bartender laughs his head off
and I know that we have to split the gate among the five of us
our manager 10% his girlfriend who does our sound
the roadie who was drunk all evening
the guy we found to do the roadie's job
the lightman and his cousin who was helping him
the driver
the stooge who likes Susan and came along to "tune" her drums
the DJ who booked the job
and of course the kickback
to the clubowner who didn't wanna hire
a buncha girls playing rock 'n' roll
cause girls can't rock out
everybody knows that
even though he pulled in over three thousand clams
peddling his watery Scotch and Diet-Rites
and only gave us what he claimed came through the door
so that he could tell me
You done pretty good while he smiles his cretinous smile
For broads
knowing that these broads filled his rathole
with enough yowling slamdancing spending spitting
weekend punks and college spilloff
to make what he would call
A fair fuckin' night
I call that fair.
Because after laboring over my poetry
for twelve tormenting years
crying out alone in my library cubicle
in my bed on the john even
on top of Thoor Ballylee to the dismay of the jackdaws
the ghost of W.B. Yeats
and the wide-eyed freckled tour-guide
after typing pruning tightening recasting polishing
sending out with SASE
waiting three months four months nine months
to get back that small blue slip
Thank you for sending but we find
that's the record for me long enough to have a baby
a bastard someone to take care of me in my dotage
when I'm sitting in a room still writing poetry
rather that than this folded wrinkled aborted sheet of words
poor pitiful thing I long to defend
after getting dismembered for the tenth time
in the same Sisyphean poetry workshop
by the same earnest young T.S. Eliot slash Rimbaud
slash William Carlos Williams slash Bob Dylan
slash fill in the blank
with a round starkly intense face and severe ponytail
didn't his mommy ever warn him he'd go bald that way?
that either makes him look like Saint John or Gidget
even after I stood up and slowly oh so deliberately
put on my motorcycle jacket with the studs and chain
and lean over the table at him
wanting needing to hit him over the head
with his villanelle To the Passenger Pigeon An Elegy
to give his ponytail a good hard tug and hear him squeak
You hate men he says
You have latent lesbian tendencies
Your clothes give You away Your poetry gives You away
Everything gives You away
I don't hate men at all I say as I walk out
for good
I don't men I just hate you
And after waiting a year and a half for the East Buttfuck River Review
to appear
bearing my tiny poem like an appetizer
holding it hot in my hands fondling my printed name
as if it were invisible ink
and knowing in my heart all the while that
if I'm incredibly lucky
and all copies are delivered opened
and manage to evade the garbage can
then perhaps if I'm still lucky
maybe twelve grad students
in a reference room somewhere
and god only knows where
might actually read the thing
but I would never know
never even sense
that anyone else had ever touched you
poor poem baseborn furtive and original only with sin.
But when that blear-eyed and boyish hulk
clad in studded leather gauntlets like a knight
wearing a Black Death t-shirt and platinum ducktail
I see just in front of the stage to my left and down
watching me like a dog watches a dinner table
I see him circling me between sets
clutching his seventy-five cent bottle of Olde Schwartz Premium
and blinking painfully like there's a lash stuck in his eye
when I feel him rising up on his Converse sneakers
trying to help me hit that nasty A in I Will Follow Him
swaying back and forth on the stuttering refrain
of Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out
hear him whoop out the chorus
Nobody Loves You
Everybody Hates You
And when inevitably he approaches at the end of the night
while I pack away my Stratocaster and wind my mike cord
he wobbles drunk glistening with sweat and spit beer
and then he kneels
on the broken glass the blood the dropped guitar picks
and kisses
the pointed toes of my spiky black witch shoes
O Poptart Poptart
What flavor are you?
Professor
What poem could I give him?
other than to know
to really know
that finally
I done good
and I can still hear that echo.