Guidance and Poetry

by Lytton Bell
© 2001

You can study for this great career in the privacy of your own home! Become certified in only a few months in just minutes a day!

All you need to do is:

1. Give up television, magazines… all ties to popular culture. You are a rebel now, a loner, a misfit, an outlaw. Act like it.
2. Never, never, never surrender your tequila. Keep a flask of it in your desk at work. Sleep with the bottle by your side, held next to you, coated in your drool.
3. Lose the ability to cry. This is, strictly speaking, a liability. Who needed it in the first place?
4. Fuck up all of your long-term relationships. When your first love dies in a car accident, refuse to get over it. Bore people with your self-pity. When you fall in love again, deny it. Move to a different state. Marry the wrong guy. Fuck that up too.
5. Find comfort in the arms of strangers. Refugees from the franchise tax board. Filipino business executives. Syrian network administrators, pothead waiters, legislative analysts, cheating husband consultants to the state department of health and human services, actuaries, investment bankers…you get the drift.
6. Begin an alliance with the next Henry Miller, the semi-genius-who-doesn't-know-it-yet (and you're not allowed to tell him) and thinks he's just an ordinary guy. Convince him you are the one who is special.
7. Somehow manage to complete the duties of your day job, though you are not certain what these actually entail. Bluff by trying to appear busy while actually writing poems all day long.
8. Wear underwear only when absolutely necessary.
9. Absolve your guilty conscience by performing weekly acts of community service. Remain kind to children at all times.
10. Regret nothing, even if, by some miracle of alcoholic-blackoutism, you can remember it in the first place.

There! Congratulations and welcome to the exciting field of alcoholic-poet-sluttiness, where opportunity doesn't just knock… it comes inside and stays a while.

 

A Personal Question

 

We met at the bar
Two hours later
Without a word
You were stuffing your cock
Into me from every angle
Moaning as you came

"Do you do this
Kind of thing often?"
I asked you after, smiling
My voice as casual as
Keyless entry
And you scowled

"That is a personal question,"
You replied, with bitter gall
And did not speak again
Though you wrote your number
On my hand in permanent ink

 

 

In the porno section
at the video store
two grease monkeys are talking
They’re wondering why
I’m here
intruding
unwelcome
with my real tits and real sighs
and they antagonize me since I won’t
avert my eyes
And then finally, one of them says to the other
who cares, dude, they’re all cunts
they’re all fucking bitches