Archive | November, 2015

Personals Ad

28 Nov

Mildly attractive, cocky basketball junkie looking for sophisticated, smart, funny, and moderately attractive woman to engage in sexual activities 7-14 times a week, and with whom to possibly travel the world.

 

An appreciation for basketball a plus, but not a necessity. Must be tolerant of sports talk radio, loud music at 2 AM, and the occasional smell of Marijuana coming from the front porch. Intellectual conversations are welcome as long as they don’t turn pretentious, and silence is greatly appreciated (especially during basketball seasons).

 

I’m not much for drama. I live a simple life. that includes work and lifting weights (sporadically). In my spare time I write about, play, and watch basketball. Everything else in life is gravy (including you).

 

Serious inquiries only. Please contact at given address.

Sincerely,

Bobby Mickey

 

 

~Edward Austin Robertson

Thanksgiving Break Mini-Playlist

28 Nov

Visioneers -Ike’s mood

El Ten Eleven – My Only Swerving

Wu-Tang Clan- Its Yourz

Capital STEEZ- Chicago

Earl Sweatshirt- Hoarse

The Rolling Stones- I Just Wanna See his Face

Bad Brains- I Luv I Jah

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Dregs

28 Nov

My apartment smells funny.

It hits me every time I 

open the door to the building.

 

My neighbors are nice enough

though they are either A.A.R.P.

A.A.

or with the Mental Health Association.

 

The apartment manager is a nosey gossip

whose son was stabbed last week

trying to break up a domestic dispute.

 

My newest pastime is wrapping

live roaches into tissue paper

and burning them in my sink.

 

It isn’t the best place I’ll ever live

but at least it’s my own space.

Any noise that I hear I is because I made it.

I’m the only person that I have to clean up after, and

If I bring an ugly girl home, no one has to know about it.

 

I can see the river from my bedroom window

and the sunrise occurs over the park

across the street.

It been ten years since I left college

and I’m not that far away from all those

anxieties and doubts that I felt–

stress dogging me even under the best of circumstances.

 

Although I knew it all would work out,

I would have never guessed in a million years

that I would take the path that I traveled to get there–

here.

 

I doubted myself the whole time

even with the constant reminders that everything was okay.

How could I have known it would look the way it does?

I wasn’t creative enough to know what it would look like,

but I had enough faith to know it could work.

 

This isn’t what I envisioned for myself to be in my late thirties.

But it is also the last time that I’ll ever get to live like a deadbeat

something I’ve turned into an artform–

yet it certainly had an expiration date.

 

It was time to position myself as a breadwinner,

no more promises or projected trajectories.

Just cold hard fact

Ipso Facto

Women my age are no longer wowed by potential

from men my age.

 

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m quite thankful for what I have

the place is almost a step up

from an Eastern Bloc ghetto in the mid- 80’s.

 

There was a time in my life

when I didn’t even need a bed

living like a character out of a

literary (Fante?Carver?Bukowski?) narrative.

 

There was a romantic element in sleeping

soundly in a sleeping bag on the floor.

I was so much younger then,

my joints didn’t scream as loudly from

a bad night’s sleep

 

It is too late to question my subconscious.

I chose to be here

out of desperation, laziness, and being cheap,

out of the need to remind myself

that I’m not quite there yet,

that I have to work just a little bit harder

to wake up to that feeling again

of being where I’m suppose to be.

~Edward Austin Robertson

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Thinking of Paris

25 Nov

It felt good to have my window open

the night sky and the cold rain

gave my apartment  a sense of time and place.

 

Trying to process my thoughts–

everything felt so jumbled together.

Softly wondering what 15 yr old me would think

if he knew that 20 years would barely change anything.

I still preferred watching sports to social interaction

and still jerking off more than what is considered healthy.

 

But 15 yr old me could have never imagined

the irregular path that he would travel 

to get to this point today.

And control, yes–I finally had control.

The biggest tragedy of my teenage years

was a lack of autonomy.

 

Paris couldn’t have been further away

than when I was living in Texas as a kid.

At least now it is a viable thought

less abstract,

but mostly a fantasy,

involving a beautiful woman

and literary groupies inside

cramped coffee shops

and bookstores.

 

But I’d read the headlines.

Saw the footage.

Even cried a little.

Friday the 13th brought in a gloom

that kept hanging.

Everyone so unnerved

because the illusion had finally been shattered.

 

The world has never been safe

for Muslims, for Jews, for Africans, For Arabs.

 

We have to treat each other better.

There is no way around it.

Which means I have to learn to treat others better too.

 

I still have not been to France.

But I will go someday–hopefully

on someone else’s dime.

and when I’m looking into the eyes

of my good company,

we can clink our wine glasses together

and I can tell her about this moment;

staring out of my apartment window on a rainy night,

thinking about the attacks

and how that event affected me.

 

~Edward Austin Robertson

 

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Your Dog Dies

22 Nov

it gets run over by a van.

you find it at the side of the road

and bury it.

you feel bad about it.

you feel bad personally,

but you feel bad for your daughter

because it was her pet,

and she loved it so.

she used to croon to it

and let her sleep in her bed.

you write a poem about it.

you call it a poem for your daughter,

about the dog getting run over by a van

and how you looked after it,

took it out into the woods

and buried it deep,deep,

and that poem turns out so good

and you’re almost glad the little dog

was run over, or else you’d never

have written that good poem.

then you sit down to write

a poem about writing a poem

about the death of that dog,

but while you’re writing you

hear a woman scream

your name, your first name,

both syllables,

and your heart stops.

after a minute, you continue writing.

she screams again.

you wonder how long this can go on.

 

~Raymond Carver

Armistice Day

11 Nov

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

~Kurt Vonnegut

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Guilty Pleasure of the Week

7 Nov

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