Well…we’ve come to the end of it, folks. The true and honest
official end to WineDrunk SideWalk. Today’s post is going to be the final “poem
of the day” post for the blog. I will maintain WineDrunk until the end of 2016,
and post links when poems and short stories (should I ever write one again) get
published in a journal or zine or whatever people call these literary dumping
grounds these days. I do plan on coming back in 2017 with a new blog and I will
post a link to that as well, thus officially ending good ol’ WineDrunk SideWalk
1.0 for good. I’m also planning to start putting out my own poetry books,
hopefully by my 43rd birthday in April, as well as maybe doing an
online or print poetry journal to showcase other writers. I started taking
photographs this year, not very good as of now, but I may try doing something
with that as well.
I started this blog in 2008 as….hell, I don’t know. If you
go back 8 years I have picture and a blog post about Sarah Palin for Christ’
sake. But I soon developed WineDrunk into a poetry site, mostly to keep me
writing regularly. I think I’ve achieved that. And it’s been really wonderful
to have had people read and comment on the blog. I think of WineDrunk as a fine
piece of digital art. But this year I’ve gotten rather restless with the whole
thing. Concentrating on writing a novel while revising another novel lead to a
lot of frustration on my part in having to post a poem daily and to try and
have that poem at least maintain some quality, some shred of artistic value. I
don’t think I failed but, more often than not, I was rather disappointed by a
lot of what I put up on the blog in 2016. I don’t take disappointment easy and
I don’t want to post poems that I’m not at least somewhat proud of. So I made
the decision to stop the blog in order to work closer on the fiction and to
give the poetry the actual time it deserves. Will it make me a better writer? I
don’t know.
Again…I thank all of you who have read the blog and have participated
in this little art experiment of mine. I hope when the time comes you’ll follow
me along to the next adventure, and I can follow you along as well.
jg
so here's to getting a little WineDrunk one last time.
needing a job
it was buffalo
and i hadn’t worked in over a month
and all i did was sit in the apartment
and eat bologna sandwiches and drink labatt beer
when my wife got home from her job
i was sort of drunk
my wife always managed to find a job first
in whatever city we moved to
it was always me sitting at home
eating cold cuts and drinking beer
or going to temp agencies
or filling out applications in big box stores
always me needing a job
and it was buffalo in may
but it felt like march outside
but i walked the city looking for work anyway
i drove up its empty drags searching for help wanted
and there were no jobs at the temp agencies
and the big box stores weren’t hiring
neither were the non-profits and the cold offices
it looked like it was going to snow in may
and i thought at least that would be something
i found this job in a bath and shower warehouse
and i sat in front of bald man
who was doing interviews
and he had a goatee because he was bald
and he asked me if i wanted to work in the warehouse
as if he and i had been searching for each other
our whole lives
and he showed me pictures of the team
on their kayaking trips
he said, do you like to kayak?
and i had no answer for that
he said, just one thing,
on your resume it says you write
he said, what kind of writing do you do?
the occasional wrong-headed, misguided rant
on someone’s blog, i said
and when he didn’t laugh at that i said
poetry…and fiction
he said, hmmmm….well….i really want to hire you
but what happens if you write a novel?
will you just up and quit?
will you just up and quit?
and i wanted to tell him how hard it was to write a novel
how much harder it was to get a novel published
i wanted to talk to the bath and shower warehouse man
about literary agents and editors
and marketing and the whole whoring business of writing
but instead i just looked around the office
and said, i need a job
because my wife and i were on our third city
in as many years
because i was getting fat sitting alone at home
eating bologna sandwiches and drinking
all of that beer
because a savings account can only go so far
and the bills were due and the landlord wanted rent
the warehouse guy said you’re hired
and i told him great
even though i hoped to drive the car
over one of those highway embankments on the way home
he showed me the warehouse
it was full of bath and shower parts
and people walking around looking like they’d
needed a job at one point in their lives
and this was the best that they’d gotten
for being born against their will
the bald, goateed warehouse man handed me paperwork
and i walked out of the squat building like a zombie
and i sat in the car and watched the sun droop in the sky
i thought about spending the next thirty years in there
and by some dark magic i didn’t drive over an embankment
but instead went home to where my wife
was already back from work
making spaghetti and drinking a labatt blue
and i kissed her on the lips
and got a labatt blue out of the fridge
and i sat at the kitchen table looking at the paperwork
as food was being cooked
and my stomach rumbled
and outside our little kitchen window
i swear on christ’s wooden cross
i saw a snowflake fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment