Let Me Read That Outsider Poetry, White Boy
I remember the decade or so when I worked a wedding reception almost every Saturday night. I loved it when they would play Wild Cherry’s song “Play That Funky Music.” I’d often be blasted out of my mind at that point and getting paid a few hundred dollars to celebrate the happiest day of peoples’ live with them. Somebody has to do it. On occasion I’d even write down poetry on cocktail napkins. A lot of my third book Flesh Wounds was written that way, the same way a lot of Detached Retinas was written on a Sears delivery truck, or on scraps of refrigerator boxes or delivery manifolds. When you’re a poet you write on whatever is around. I never took my work seriously enough to keep most of those scraps, and I have a tendency to want to throw out whatever previous incarnation of a poem I was working on as soon as I finish a new draft.
This poem was written one time when I was trying to escape Rockford by going to Evanston and living in the basement of two female studies professors at Northwestern. I had a lot of fun that Spring living in their basement and watching Dark Shadows at four in the morning. I think the whole time I was there I only saw them one time. Their pit bull would often come downstairs and talk to me because he knew they were vegetarians and I wasn’t.
Collected
Say something interesting. Come to our dinner party And insult our queer friends. Please stay in our basement And pee in our sink. You’re our very first poet. We were hoping for PP But we heard some nice Things about you, too. Say something outrageous. Eat light bulbs and peanut Butter and be feral and Nasty and awful to us. You’re a real poet. Come out on the town with us And cause a scene. Drink enough for us all And go to jail for us all. Sleep with us. We’ve never had a poet.
Please get us some Good drugs. Don’t forget To write nice things About us. You don’t mind, Do you?
My attempt to escape Rockford failed, and I returned to my life of working in bars and doing wedding receptions every Saturday night. That went on for a few more years, then my brother fulfilled his dream of owning his own bar and brought me in to be the general manager. But that’s another book entirely full of boater assholes and roller girls. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Outsider Poet theatre.
