the last poem of the day 08.29.16

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 43^rd 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?

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.