I wrote my only complete poetry manuscript, Climbs & Diving, on public transit routes, beer-drenched Philadelphia countertops, and in between the three jobs I juggled after I was jettisoned from Rutgers into the apathy-saturated petrodollar-lovin’ population. Those days were stark and glorious. The futures traders would never get it and neither would I, but we wouldn’t get it in completely different ways.
I wrote the final poem first on a snowy spring break trip to Maine during my last year of college. I couldn’t tell you where the lines came from but once I had committed them to paper, I knew the poem could be even better. So I printed out the poem, cut out the lines, and put the cut out lines in a hat. I then rearranged the poem line by line as I removed them from that hat and in a few months I had eeked out 32 more poems that have since survived several hard drives, a couple wars of aggression, and a hare-brained scheme to move to Vermont.
Here’s the final poem:
XXXIII.
Towards the root notes
Of New England climbs and dives
Unfolded during the volume
White thighs complete
With nervous twittering
Where’s Montana
Divvied up among ossified lookers-on
And the elaborate equation
Under an undulating Bronx
“What’s wrong with you?”
Vibrating in quick audacity
Where’s the one thing that I bought
No more shakiness
Through the thistles
Of an inaudible barre chord
“Just off Main St.” in Penebscot, Maine
Under the chandelier light
And not even wearing a brassiere
I can hear everything there
“Everything is wrong”
Weighted the consonants incorrectly
From the vowel shop by the harbor?
Where’s Wyoming?
Pushing glass back into the dirt
Into new English signs
With you and more importantly
I climb and dive