(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995)

The Math of Betrayal

The math of betrayal my friends will never line up
We curse bankers on account of ancient swindles
detest the blameless sweaters lovers once wore
begrudge our own children their fleeing footspeed

Math imposes order on a universe of faulty pledges
But the math of betrayal friends undoes such claims
In every heart the geometry of self-ruin crushes trust
the differential from hope to hope collapses

Long ago I had a brother I held as dear as any lover
he still calls needing in some way to add himself to me
a simple operation: one plus one equals perfect silence

Sorry. I’m going to need a moment to collect myself. I sometimes forget how deep I am. And then I read this poem and I remember. And then I write another poem and the whole cycle starts again.

What really bums me out about this one is the way in which it actually begins to be about something important, something that matters, namely the turbulent love I feel toward my brothers and the way this love has crippled my capacity to love other people. But I didn’t want to get into all that, not really. Way too much disclosure, too much mess.

So: metaphor!

God, how I hate metaphor! It’s the karaoke of literary devices. Do I even need to explain what I mean?

It just makes me tired.

Will you guys just do me a favor? Just this one. If you find yourself writing a poem or an essay or a story or a novel, and you find yourself using a metaphor, comparing one thing to another thing in the hopes of impressing your poor reader, will you just stop and imagine I’m standing right behind you, in my Bad Poet beret, cheering wildly.

The differential from hope to hope collapses.

Yeah, it does.

As for the differential from Shirley Shultz and bad poetry, that’s a growth stock. Ms. Shultz is from Toganga Canyon, CA, where she tends to flirtatiously frail animals with her Jah stick.

His Shepherding Love

It twas a newly clustered morning-glory glen
A precariously borne good-natured friend.
Tiny the humming helibirds to hover above
With nothing wanton nor amazingly odd, til
Sanctimoniously doth day alarmingly aspire
To breathe an acute demonically fed desire.
Borne by flirtatiously frail shoeless feet
Blushingly discriminate yet wisely discreet
Motivated to tip-toe about haplessly astray
Wild yet putatively of the master’s display.
Askance for tossing commonsense aside
Alas be best to stand anchored with pride.
If twas my hungry soul I wouldst fare feat
It’d be toward Jah I’d my very heart’s beat.
For taking flight aye toward heavenly shore
To aye see ajar my home’s hope filled door.
Blessed be angelic sons of stealthy throng
Recruiting red-feathered warbler to sing along
Whilst crowds of snow-white cooing dove,
A fitting memorial of His shepherding love.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Cry Timber

I am long tired
of the tyranny
of trees

those staid and stoic
giants who
secretly long

to snap
the bones
of stupid children

to tease with
bursts of leaves
not quite red

before retreating
when we need
shelter most

coat-racked
in winter dismay,
sapped –

roots rising from glazed
ground just enough
to buckle wayward toes.

I wish upon
their haughty
silence

nothing but blights
dutch elm
root rot –

anything to canker
their unsouled
resolve

to strip them
of their
barked hauteur

Make them share,
for a season’s single second
the torment

of limbs
that apprehend
of flesh that fears.

Yes, that’s right. It’s the trees’ fault! Those arrogant pines! Those duplicitous sycamores! With their stupid bark. And their stupid leaves. Kill the trees, I say! Who’s with me?

….

Okay, how about if we just write a poem projecting all our histrionic self-loathing onto the trees? Would that make anyone feel better? What if we make this “poem” all tall and skinny – like an actual tree? And what if we restrain from the use of commas for no apparent reason? And if we make essentially arbitrary line breaks? Yes? Any takers?

….

See, this is what I hate about being a Bad Poet. Nobody’s ever with you! Nobody ever gets how iconoclastic your shit is. The Bad Poet never gets any extra credit for eschewing the safe opinion. (We don’t even get extra credit for using the verb eschew.) All those Sierra Club poets writing their elegies to the lonely forest, their paeans to the wine dark sea – ass kissers, all of them. Bucolic toadies. Robert Frost, meet Stevie Fucking Chainsaw.

Because, see, my point here, the big mind-blowing revelation that arrives only when you ditch the conventional wisdom and take the dangerous spiritual path of the Bad Poet, is, uh, well … Trees Are Fucking Heartless. They don’t feel pain. They don’t suffer.

If you did a statistical breakdown of my thousands of bad poems – a task that perhaps awaits you in hell – you would find that 99 percent of them are about suffering. Not any specific occasion of suffering, mind you, but the generalized state so familiar to adolescents, and so frequently commemorated by them in journals with poems of the approximate opacity and bombast that I would achieve, a mere 20 years north of my own adolescence – journals, I might add, almost always made of paper.

Fucking trees.

Fucking Mr. Bruce Butters, of Klutzhaven, MI, is our next fucking contestant. His precise feelings about trees remain unknown.

Pre-Prozac Poem

From Des Moines, from Birmingham, from Reno we came
To rhapsodize the darker land.
It echoes even now, our anthem of the other world.
Of water, air, compelling tides of stone, the song–
Trees danced and fell.

Books in America tell today
How good it is to die,
The sleepy needing sleep.  At this
Enormous hearts explode with joy!
This is why the children jump in jellied gasoline.

The mouth within us sings,
The song compels us to the dance.

Kill yourself, the music says,
But do the others first.

Submit your bad poetry to Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner:

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Your Poem*
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Related Posts:

• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club