25/30: Conversations With My Classmate-Professor Over Lunch in Cardiff

Of all the places, high street, of all the places on high street, a faux-mexican

chain with bad spellings and valleys accents. Here again for all the unpacking
at the logical end of the course we took together.
find ourselves comparing notes eight years from the day he said

so you’re also an American, and showed me the best seat

in the mini-cafe.

The years they have been kind?

Strange? About the same?

His kids are people now, big

laughs and so many transgressive

authors, Naked Lunch Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch and how the students

need

to be shaken

and twisted

and broken

you just keep writing and throwing it

out and keep writing and throwing it

out to the high street, he gestures,

something for the people, these

people they just go about their little

lives.

At some point in our thirties we just start looking the same

for a long time. We met when he was a year younger

than I am now, he’s lost a little weight, but aging only

shows in family pictures.

So many beat authors  and  pages full

of violence, his students complain, especially

the women, but people need to know

life’s not all gardens and shopping

and roses. he references Thoreau

and Ginsberg and Lydia so and so

and says something about guts

on the page. GUTS.

To break up the bland, pleasant

horror of domesticity.

What are we doing

here on the high street,

if we’re not picking  up tail

or telling rough truths?

He’s married. I’m not. He was married when we met.
I wasn’t. The Cardiff we meet in and the Cardiff

he lives in are different places even so.

The new book is meant to be

destroyed, because art is temporal.

I get a copy for free. He has to give

some of his students credit, they call him

on his shit. He’s got shit, like I’ve got shit

like they’ve got shit, but these

are his classes and

I learn more, here on high street

about Cardiff Uni Politics

than will

hopefully ever be useful.

Always used to joke to me to not get married, fuck around as

long as possible. Struck me as sad, and honest. A third weak

beer in and I remember three years ago, he sent a few links

for professor jobs in Cardiff, then one in Bellingham that

he’d thought about.

But you can’t uproot family. You, you could go anywhere.

He pulls a page out of his book and wraps his tip in it

things are going pretty well, he re-iterates, life is what it

is, just kicking against the long going

and I take another look down high street

contemplating curriculums for those who only

wish

their desperation could be

quiet.

19/30: In Which I Summon the Ghosts of Still Living Scribes

Ten oil paint woodland water scenes
in this room where two men in
turbans compare data over a
laptop and the guy who works at
the gyro place where they recognize
my nephew sits in a chair with
an embroidered cushion while
songs with echo-ey lady vocals
drift over the sound of espresso
machines, and I believe that if
there is a problem in this room
I am part of it.

This is the second poem I've written
in A Muddy Cup in my life time and the
more-than-second poem I've written
during this arbitrary daily-poem-calendar
-time about the coffee shop that I'm writing
in and if every poem is a little bit
about poetry, then all of mine are a lot
about poetry, but this is the second one
that I consciously chose to write this month
and I will finish my taxes a little  later
than I planned.

Now this is like a Shane Guthrie poem
or Ryan Johnson poem, they are also both
writing poems every day or almost
every day, because it is important and we
know we are important because we
choose to do this, and they also both
have written about the act of writing and
I'm not sure if they'll be flattered or offended

that I sat in a room with it's own library
that is in the business of giving people a
place to sit and not be terrified of the world
but ostensibly it's just coffee and now
this piece is much much longer than either
Ryan or Shane usually write, even longer
than a poem by Jake Tucker, who was the
most enthused about the 30/30s, but has
written the least, so I assume he has broken
fingers by a Moose in Canada, but yes,
mush longer of a poem than any
of theirs, unless
it's an epic diatribe,
surrealist or
political, respectively,
God
I could use
one of those

right now.