new poem 4.16.2011

work, the subshop, the grocery store,

wherever I am I’m always thinking about being somewhere else

like a young woman working a cash register, I smile until the customer stops looking,

until the apple orchard is naked and dried up, until it’s stripped bulldozed rebuilt

into a strip mall with a larger than necessary parking lot

SPACE

which is what this is really about not the final frontier,

but the amount of volume I take up, and while I push

it doesn’t push back, like a lead exit door welded shut

Excerpt from my westward tapes

But the thing is art is something you work to create, but also it takes work to enjoy the work, you have to know some things, you have to be able to follow what’s going on. It’s way easier to turn the television on, where you don’t have to know anything. You don’t even have to watch last week’s episode because they run it through for you at the beginning of the next one, like a trailer, in a quick two minutes. Instant-gratification. That’s what it’s all about, that’s what our whole culture is all about. And certainly art isn’t instantly-gratifying, it’s more rewarding process and it certainly has more meaning than whatever national network decides to put on primetime TV. But the thing is, people in general aren’t going to care about it, and you have to start out as an artist knowing that, and you have to just do your art, regardless. And if nobody pays attention and you die an old man or old woman and your work is piled up on the shelves of your one bedroom apartment, then fuck it, that’s not so bad, skyscrapers aren’t gonna last anyway.