An unpublished work to get us started

Harpo Marx, after a grueling 16 hour day of shooting could be heard by his neighbors, pacing the hard, gleaming floors of his sea-front penthouse, glaring, metallic out the plate glass picture window, hexing the ocean and, screaming- for hours. Urban myth? Bald-faced Lie? Cruel joke? A microscopic grain of sand in that ocean. Unfathomably, irrefutably of no consequence. All truth is fiction, all fiction someone’s need for truth made real. Vocation. Avocation. Don’t imagine you can stop me. Don’t imagine you know. What haunts you? A dark dank seed planted before you were born. Caves and caverns haunt me, a storm in the bottom of the ocean I will never see coming, I didn’t see it coming… I write ‘til my fingers bleed, ‘til I am Bukowski’s piano, drunk bloody known, splayed out on the kitchen floor- dissolving. Harpo? Did he ever dream of piercing that wall, that window- a hand, a blunt kick, a scratch or two -the ocean… the ocean the ocean, is it better to be swallowed up whole or swallow yourself slowly? Olga Broumas wrote by candlelight and stealth, a prisoner of organs and time. Louis Armstrong played ‘til his lips bled, nightly- to roaring crowds who danced and danced. Splayed out on the dressing room floor which was really a broom closet- Little Louis, just hiding in the closest, scared out of his mind- a storm behind that door he never saw coming, and a bloody lip and a swollen face and a roaring and a roaring in his head. We are not done. We are not dead. We are not that lucky. We are stuck. Staring out windows. Screaming. The ocean the ocean the ocean, we want it, we have not reached it, yet.

Whatever you do, write.

The eve of National Poetry Writing month is upon us. Everyday, for the month of April, write a poem. Write on paper, on your hand, a napkin, your lover... Whatever you do, write. Better yet, submit your writing here and get your writing seen on the National Poetry Writing Month site. Let the words begin.