Didn'ts

Okay, so I didn’t start the poem yet, didn’t get my desk cleaned off, didn’t get my bicycle trainer moved to my office which means I didn’t work out. Been quite a day of didn’ts.

Read a couple newish poems at open mic Wednesday evening…people laughed…they weren’t intended to make people laugh…having problems getting things right it seems…third one I read didn’t get any laughs…guess I got the dirge down…a bloody dirge…go figure. It was suppose to be an eulogy for my second wife…been trying for eight years to write an eulogy for her…actually have written several…all crap…last attempt became a dirge…like I said before, I don’t write poetry, all I do is type…now why would a poem pick someone like me to be its typist when I’m such horrible a speller? I am good with a dictionary though.

A side note about spelling: One of my students turned in a draft this week and used the word “turnt.” You know, the past tense of “turn,” as in, “I heard a noise and turnt my head.” Holy shit, can you believe someone doesn’t know what the hell that red wavy line that appears under a word is? I tried to give the person some credit and thought perhaps she had the spell checker turnt off, but had to throw that thought away since she also couldn’t figure how to put the page numbers in the header.

This poem keeps adding to itself in my head and I have a feeling that soon it will tell me to start typing. I hope so, because when poems keep popping in and out and giving more hints about what they should contain frustrates me…just tell me to type and quit screwing with me…spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…whatever Wordsworth.

If I stop smoking, start eating tofu, volunteer for some charitable organization or better yet, organizations, stop cussing, stop cussing in the classroom, quit mean mouthing god and religion in general, stop wearing red shoes, cut my hair and look respectable, get a dog and a couple of cats, not wait two or three or more months to return e-mails, call my brothers and sister more often, be more environmentally conscious, get a hybrid vehicle, bring bags to stores to carry my purchases home in, use mass transit, use less water, recycle more things, don’t buy things that can’t be recycled, stop cussing stupid people, stop thinking so many people are stupid, let people ahead of me in line, grow a garden, stop cussing the kudzu that keeps trying to invade my yard because it is, after all, just doing what kudzu does and truly doesn’t have a vendetta against me, send Christmas cards, stop gagging at the “cute” messages in the Christmas cards I receive, stop making fun of the people in the family photographs they put on their Christmas cards they send me, pay more attention to the news, feel sad when someone I’ve never heard of dies, stop laughing at the way young people dress, stop laughing at the way young people wear their hair, stop laughing at young people because they truly believe their current crisis is a crisis, be happy that someone or someone’s wife at the school where I teach has a baby, be nice to people who come to my door to preach and share the joy of their religion with me, stop cussing telemarketers, stop hoping telemarketers will call me so I can cuss them, ditto for home security representatives, be glad that all six vehicles that ran the red light made it safely through the intersection instead of wishing I had a M-series vehicle and could plow them down to teach them what the hell a red light means, stop cussing the ninety-six percent of drivers who don’t know how to use their turn signals, stop cussing drivers talking or texting on their phones and truly hope they get home safely, stop cussing the students who text in my class, stop wishing I had the nerve to drop a lit cigarette butt in butt crack of my students who dress like whores, stop thinking some of my students dress like cheap whores, stop laughing at people who wear the bill of their baseball cap backwards and then squint because the sun is in their eyes, listen to Easy Listening music instead of AC/DC and punk, stop cussing people who work so hard to look like they think they should look to be accepted instead of having enough self-confidence to look the way they do look, then I wonder if maybe I could channel “nice” poetry that people would like.