I Was Just a Poor Boy
Glory Days
Construct This
Ode on a Commodore 64
Metaphor for a Meat Market
No Time
Thank God for the Time to Ponder This
Usual
The Hard Stuff
Ode for Eminem
I'm On It
Some Further Restoration
A poor boy can do none other than God’s will.
A poor boy requires adequate and expensive footwear.
A poor boy has been searching for someone who resembles you.
A poor boy is ambivalent about his guitar
and this fact is reflected in the naming of the instrument.
It was requested that a poor boy attend a religious service
and the poor boy was worried that the structure would collapse
so upon his arrival he tossed in his hat before he entered.
After departing a locomotive in a small town
a poor boy was detained because he was impecunious
and was unfamiliar and a considerable amount of time elapsed
before a sympathetic soul produced the funds for his release
and when he encountered someone later whom he did know
and that individual inquired as to his recent whereabouts
the poor boy replied, “I was incarcerated
with some dangerous and rather lively folks.”
A poor boy has gazed upon the sea and stared down the railroad tracks.
A poor boy found himself at a crossroad and was unable
to secure transportation.
A poor boy looked way off into the distance.
A poor boy said, “Someday a song will be composed
which mentions me but the composer will be
disremembered and I will stand.” A poor boy
was early on encouraged by his parents to dance when possible.
A poor boy found a course catalogue for a local college
lying in a corn field and noticed a description of a course
in mathematics that dealt with the concept of infinity
and this awakened something in the poor boy he was never aware of
and as time passed and the poor boy got older
he would often mention to people who came in and out of his life
that somewhere highly paid people
were discussing infinity with all credulity and seriousness
and that infinity was something that was as real as when
you raise your cap above your eyes and sling your pack
upon your back and begin ambling down the tracks.
I got busted at SLU during my first year
right after moving into Scholars House
because Oliver had claimed to be a writer and a big drinker
so I pulled out some beer and a bottle of Jack
and we talked and drank for a while
and I went to use the john but when I came back
he was face down on the floor
with his loosened pants oddly around his butt
so I split and made an anonymous call
for campus security to come and make sure he was okay
but since it had happened in my room
I was made to write an essay on the dangers of drink.
Which seemed funny to me since I’d already been
drunk for several years.
I can still remember the title I lifted from somewhere:
“The Wrath of Grapes.”
Today I’m rather embarrassed again. I sent
off a book to Dr Valentine but it came back,
the package unopened. There was some esoteric
scribbling on it but it didn’t make any sense.
It was some kind of code. I hope
she doesn’t think I’m just some psycho
creepy patient from her past.
I mean, we talked about James Joyce. And the book
had such a nice inscription I wrote, an apology
for how after twenty years I’m still not fully cured.
It could be a maternal thing,
that fake psychotic familial thing. I don’t know,
it’s just that when we first met I was only on a bit of Zyprexa
and everybody seemed to think I’d soon bounce back.
Something deeper must’ve been going down. Sometimes
I still try to look up old Oliver on the computer
but he’s nowhere to be found.
Well, now that everything’s been proven
to be a dream, I’ve truly
found my place. I don’t get any
personal power, though,
my power’s all wrapped up
in the sweet leather jacket Anthony gifted to me.
I’m not saying
that it’s important to me or that I like it a lot,
I’m saying that it has some kind
of discrete special field around it.
I’m saying it’s pure magic.
What a reaction formation
against fake prophecy. Getting down
like a rap star again, like a big
rap star in the mind.
It doesn’t necessarily have to follow.
So many people who were beautiful have passed.
And when they closed Café Ventana
your whole college career came fallow
and every soul who hit upon you
or upon whom you hit
vanished into very thin air.
So keep processing the old shit—
it’s old to them but not to you—
and you’ll never have to leave those hallowed halls.
Because that’s the whole point: Eternity.
And that’s why since you were young
you’ve been told so many stories. It’s not sad
your memory is drifting. You can still recall
your father’s drunken buddy at the bar
chastising you and saying you needed
to buy a bunch of tools and get into construction.
When you come out looking for me
down at the food court
in the basement
of Crestwood Plaza
I’ll be the guy
with the telephone book
balancing on his head and
you can be sure to take comfort
in the fact that poetry has not changed
and that all of the shrinks combined
still don’t know what it is
or where it comes from.
I was out smoking under
my sister’s carport in Carbondale
and a beautiful black crow
was coming close
but when I popped open
my can of Schnucks Zero Cola
it quickly flew away.
I am so far away from whatever confidence is
I can’t make sense
of anything at all.
My main concern’s always been being.
Sure, I tell a pretty good anecdote
and all that, but always
in the back of my head is that old burden
being. I remember waking up
in a wordless panic in the fifth grade
and coming downstairs to find my mom
because I’d had a dream about nothing.
I knew nothing’s impossible.
And later when I made it to SLU
I became obsessed with ontology
and I ran around campus
trying to impress the great Aristotelian,
Father Henle, who
was at the tail end of a glorious career
and oddly whose Latin grammar I used
later up at NYU.
I’ve been thinking lately of that asshole fascist
Heidegger who asked the right questions
but whose answers didn’t make any sense to me,
other than language being the house of being.
That’s appealing. But my brain still bursts
and breaks out whenever I try to think about nothing.
I dream often I’m in a hotel way far away up north
and when I get off the elevator and step into the lobby
the floor isn’t there, it’s in a field of being like
the rings of Saturn, or I’m shrunk down so much
in a grocery store I can see spaces electric in the food.
But here’s a secret: all this morning on social media
I kept thinking, Oh, I’ve got to write that poem about time.
And I had to keep correcting myself, not time, not time,
but being.
Thank God for the Time to Ponder This
Sometimes I feel
like a really big loser
with no real sense
of reality.
But when I think about nothing
it’s like I’m going to throw up
or maybe pass out,
something.
And when I think about the signs I’ve
seen I get scared with the sense
of overwhelming power and think
I must’ve been lying to myself.
I yearned for secret knowledge when young
and I didn’t see it
for quite a while until
my brain sufficiently decayed
and when it came
it was so plain and obvious
like the cashier who just slyly smirked
when I was buying
some Diet Dr Pepper because
she was able to read me so easily
and a young literature student
had come in right before me
and we were all rising and congregating.
If I die and it turns out everything was paganism
I’m going to be really screwed over
for all my humiliations and ego catastrophes.
Unless, maybe my passive aggressions were a type of power?
Wow. Within about an hour
down on the patio at Parkview Place
with my iPod and my cigarettes and diet soda
I was able to see an ever subtle
drug deal and a dude
brandishing his old-fashioned firearm
and an old now-homeless neighbor
who’s down on his luck
trying to sneak back in the building.
I tried to be cool and gave him a smoke.
One of the sad things is that
I feel I can’t say anything properly
since my dear sister said
I needed to stop using
exclamation points.
And just imagine the level of suffering
one must endure
having to see everything
without having taken
one’s usual nap.
It’s a weird feeling
that I can’t quite put my finger on
but I’m starting to think
that a deeply paranoid vibe
has dictated and pervaded
my whole uptight rigid thing.
It’s so hard to get out of your awareness
when you’re so ready
for someone to come down
on you. Maybe
I can blame my dad. Not bloody
likely.
Once I was released
into the mystery of things
as in
how had Sarah McLachlan
heard about me
in order to write her most famous song
and why in the hell wouldn’t
the strange woman on the payphone
outside of Mid-Mo hospital
let me order up a flight
to Chicago,
I was soon locked up. That’s just
the nature of things.
When your consciousness explodes
you begin to see that everything had to be
and couldn’t have been otherwise. If you waste
years on Latin declensions and nowhere
obscure allusions you’ll never get the news.
Now, let us stay off the hard stuff.
I don’t want to stir things up anymore.
I’ve made my lovely peace with chaos
and I’m open. But my God,
I’m already doing stuff at the rehab facility
and now they want me
down at the mental health facility.
Nobody knows
how much time it takes to think.
Or muse, maybe.
And there’s no real way
I’d be able to help anybody
inside a nice building with central
air and heat
if I couldn’t mention
the time I had to hide my clothes in Forest Park
or the time that famous nurse
asked me how long it had been raining
so they could evaluate my perception
of time.
I helpfully had to say apart from penetrating visions
that the first thing to go
is your ability to participate
in goal-oriented activity. I’m going on
twenty years of compliance and it’s still a problem.
I’m still looking for that bitter
art therapist so I can tell her
I’m getting published across the pond.
But now I’m friends with time. Sort of like how
I was frightened so bad by Eminem so I walked
through Dogtown down to the K-Mart with my
headphones and bought his tape
and exorcised the whole vibe.
I’ve given up on any sense of reality anymore.
I’ve let myself go: None of it was my fault.
Clever people say what’s reality
but if they’d lost it they’d know.
I’m getting my own way
down the path of the discourse of damnation
and you know that I know
just how to comfort myself.
My sense of aesthetics remains untouched.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m no longer an asshole.
Sure, sometimes I feel like throwing
up. I was bragging loudly
in my sister’s car on the way to ihop
about how I wasn’t afraid of cops anymore
and when we pulled into the parking lot
what did I see but a couple of cop cars.
Oh, what can you do when you’re
having a cigarette and your buddy
is talking to his girlfriend
and she twitches her pinkie toward
you? And at some sweaty gathering too!
Sometimes I still get the psychotic vibe down
at the rehab facility when I’m sitting alone
and the staff members are talking and acting
like it has nothing to do with me and one guy said
“You can do whatever you want here” so maybe
they’re normal but took some psychedelics in college or
something. Or maybe they’re symptomatic too.
Whatever. It’s going to take real schizophrenia
to break it down. Have no fear, I’m on it.
I don’t think of the Big Other
as a person or a linguistic structure
but as whatever they call the world
touching the primary process
in a series of sinister bad signs.
Today at church I was met
with yet another uncanny blocking device.
I tend to sit across the aisle
from where they have a computer and a projector
and a couple of people sitting there
who handle all the media
that goes on the screen behind the pastor
like bible verses and bullet points during the sermon
and also all the lyrics to the songs
of worship and a few times
when my seat was taken
I sat among the media people
and as the pastor directed before the sermon
I’d bump fists or pat shoulders and say hello
and it was always awkward
so today when I came in
there was a huge twelve-foot curtain darkly
separating the media people from me
and everything came on the screen like magic
until the end of the sermon
when the pastor had to quote scripture without aid
and the screen was vacant.
Well, surely I haven’t come to break it down.
What I want to do is build it back up.
Matthew Freeman is the author of seven books of poems, most recently I Think I'd Rather Roar (Cerasus Poetry). His most recent chapbook was Exile (2River). He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-St Louis.
