No Rhythm Blues
The following is the title poem from Seth A. Tribble’s newest book of poetry.
Buy it to help support a struggling poet, or if you live in the Tacoma, WA area go see one of his shows.
Look for Seth’s reading tour this year, and keep up with him on his website.
No Rhythm Blues
“Dear God, make me a writer again!” –Jack Kerouac
Gone!
It’s gone!
I got nothin’ left
But the passion and blue
My lady sure is pretty
And she loves me true
I love her too
With my little black book
Pen in hand and nothin’ in my head
No booze in my belly or junk in my blood
It’s boiling roiling toiling still trying
To find in me
Capacity
But opacity still prevents
Simplest expression
Serving soulless sentences
Still stinging singing slave songs
Old and not of my making
Marking maps in my mind
Meandering mesmerized
Looking lost like little latchkey I am
Always assuming assurance
Is right round the bend
But blended blunders blind my third eye
And still the only thing to write
Is true
I’m blue
And resorting to rhyme
Makes me angry
It’s not me!
Never will be!
But there it is, me
Contradicting me
And my ability to self-deny
But I try and that’s what’s important
The never being satisfied
Always being hungry for new
And interesting ways to fuck it all up
But the only way
Tried and true is to
Stop
But I’m stuck
Striving standing driving on
To make something real enough
To put down on paper
I got too much technology, too little time
And an opinion for every asshole who asks
I’m over-occupied and still
Somehow underachieving
Perceiving myself in a way I haven’t
For quite some time now
As something worth more
Than an epitaph or obituary
Tragically understated
Survived by half-filled notebooks
And scraps of napkin
Scratched upon in late-night hours
In a corner of obscurity
And security made of my own
Self doubt stained with halos
Of long dried coffee and ink
Smudged with fingerprints
And now complacency gives way
To invasions of ambition
And an all-consuming desire
Don’t desire, be desired
Desire drives disappointment
And at times it was better to be the body wanted
Than cold outside
And I was good at that too
So before the onslaught of wanting
Beset by the urge to retreat
I shake
And she shakes with me
Like leaves in a storm me and my muse
Until I see my enemy
And take her hand
This is where I make my stand
In this old apartment
This dirty diner
This one more page
Swelling to anthems
Pages of victory
And another fruitful night
Of trite and stunted little words
Trying desperately to be
The fulfillment of all those things I want
But can’t stomach to try
And by the time I’ve come to the point
When I should stop wanting
More!
Like a face of avarice
And I am amiss
Something’s coming
I can hear its footprints
Down the hall
The resolution sought
Were all the scary monsters
In my childhood closet
Come to take my soul
And my notebooks and my pens!
And all my empty pages!
And leave me with the wanting!
That damnable desire
To express that me I want to be
In words cryptic hodgepodge
So the only ones understanding
Are the ones I want to understand
And hand in hand we face the fact
That we are beautiful!
And so is this twisted, wretched world
But I can’t.
Not right now.
I’m blue.