TEN THOUSAND BY THE FOURTH OF JULY

#45 MUGGED into poetry

If you haven't been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. After I was mugged recently in Philadelphia this exercise came to mind on the subway ride home, the post-mugging subway ride, when poetry took it's rightful place at the center of my world where even muggers play a part in it, it being bigger than the knife, more concentrated and firmer than his cock which will have many admirers in prison one day soon. He's going to die. So am I. So are you. He could have EASILY killed me, he and his three friends BUT I AM ALIVE AND QUITE WELL writing for poetry as I willingly came to this cesspool of humanity to do. All the globe becomes a poem. It is enough to manage this small part, here, a body, in a body, stinking, beautiful, a bit of tormented, angry, tender, delicious flesh. It is enough. Each of us. If we can read this we are all alive and creative. Anyone who tells you that you are not creative is a coward afraid of his own potential, trust me. Ignore all cowards, they were born to be ignored. Find your strength, find your poems. Every morning for two weeks as soon as you waken PREDICT your death. And write it down. For instance, "by choking in 11 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 12:18 pm." THEN STARTING at the tips of your toes touch your cells of skin and nails, feel the bones, feel a pulse, the hair, feel your moving body in the morning always moving as long as you are alive you are moving blood through veins moving thoughts through dreams EVERY morning for two weeks touch every inch of your body's surface and your holes moist and dry. As soon as you finish this morning ritual write a dream into a poem or a poem from the moving blood in the thoughts of the dream, and combine that LIVING poem with the prediction of your death. Click HERE to see my poem from the execution of this exercise, "GUESSING MY DEATH."

posted by poet CAConrad @ 8:26 PM