He is sitting outside of

A crowded Parisian café

Writing in a notebook

With a cup of expresso

Smoking a cigarette

Disheveled red hair

Rough beard

Furrowed brow

Lost in creation…

 

For a moment I have a flashback

Of writing outside NYC bars

With literary dreams

In my swelling heart…

 

And as I observe this young man

I feel a wave of

Sympathy…tenderness…

And I want to say to him

PLEASE! YOU STUPID BASTARD!

QUIT WASTING YOUR TIME!

DO YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT

THESE WORDS? THESE IDEAS?

GO TO JOURNALISM SCHOOL

YOU…YOU…YOU HOPEFUL FOOL!

WRITE ABOUT DIABETIC TEST STRIPS

FOR A MONTH AND PUT IN THE TIME…

LIKE…UH…LIKE A REAL MAN!

 

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Wisps of fading smoke

Above crowded and noisy tables

Of an outdoor café

 

Dusty streaks of fading sunlight

Through the avenues’ trees

Laughter and shouts

Philosophical banter and drunken bouts

 

As night takes the day

 

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There are many forms

Of education/s

Lying aching on a lumpy couch

After clearing tables and washing dishes

For strangers’ celebrations

Wanting to thrust a juvenile twitching brain

Into the consuming oblivion of excess libations

Slowly shedding these snake skins

Of a spoiled, debaucherous adolescence and petty adulations

Sticky film of sweat, berating voices, lacerating films

Of the past and a banal existence mixing with jackhammer

Invasions and pulsing temptations pernicious persuasions

Go jack off and eat dollar pizza you privileged red-headed caucasian

Succumb to the easy evasions oh you think you’re patient?

An undiagnosed patient? You think anyone cares you’re alone here in fear

Craving and raging? Or about your ruminations and frustrations and

Fulminations? The doubts and dead ends of your scribbling and wandering

Vocation? This couch is a lazy contracting contagion and spiritual stagnation

Get up you withering, bitter bastard before you

 

Now I’m lying in an empty park at midnight before a graduation

And the grass is cool, breeze from the river refreshing, and I’m weeping and I

Tell myself to try and let myself enjoy this brief sensation

This small step forward, a steady gradation, towards a vision of creation

Years and frontiers to go but breathe in this rising elation

Before I get up and go home and tomorrow morning

Receive a piece of paper that looks like a PowerPoint slide

Made in five minutes for academic accreditation.

 

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