Semester Project

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits said it best: “Life’s so different than it is in your dreams...”

The struggle to find yourself and decide what kind of person you’re going to be is hard enough. In today’s fast track world it’s harder still--especially with a barrage of media attacking on all fronts: Including the world-wide web, advertisements, movie, t.v., radio, magazines, news, and mobile devices. It’s everywhere you look. 

Whether you realize it or not, the media plays a significant role in shaping who we are as a people and as individuals. It’s through our interactions with the media and with our family and friends that we build our personalities, beliefs, and ideals--even our identity and sense of self. While much of what goes into our inner cells is hard-wired before the age of seven, the rest is ultimately decided by what we choose to subscribe to. As Paul Simon put it: “The man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest...” 

But even so, it’s easy to get overwhelmed--especially when you’re about to graduate college, step out into “the real world,” and carve yourself out a piece of territory. It’s a notoriously tough time for everybody, and we all get a little jaded. 

For my semester project I’ve written a nearly 2,000 word poem touching on these themes of disillusionment and disenchantment that come with adolescence and the first early years of adulthood. To do this I’ve researched poets from the beat generation, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as other notable poets like Charles Bukowski--who spoke on similar grounds in their work.     

 

My message is simple: You should try to decide what kind of person you are and live by your own moral compass. Don’t let superficialities, majority opinion, or cunning manipulative tactics through media, or otherwise, dictate who you are.   

Sources:

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl And Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956,1959. 

Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1955, 1957.

Print.

Kerouac, Jack. Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1959.

Print.

Bukowski, Charles. Love Is A Dog From Hell. New York: HarperCollins, 1977.

Print.

Bukowski, Charles. Factotum. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.

Print. 

Cummings, E.E. Erotic Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Print.

Snarling With Flame

By Scott Nisley

For Fran Valdez

I

There was magic all around us in those days. Without fear of ridicule or judgement we roamed beneath the jeweled blue skies of our youth knowing the answers to life’s riddles--believing we were prophets among fools, seers among madmen...And though the candlelight of childhood has burned away and been swept clean with the ashes of time, you can still catch a glimpse of it on those hypo-manic days in Spring when the sun hangs low in the evening, as shadows gather darkness in the street, and light bounces off every window in town. You can almost see yourself down by the schoolyard kicking up dirt on the playgrounds of a past life--watching the familiar battles wage lost and won--a young girl’s shadow dancing in the sun. Were we so mad to think we knew what life was all about? Were we the fools all along? Fool enough to scale the rooftops undercover of Friday night darkness? Mad enough to tiptoe up the fire escapes--the iron cobwebs that seemed to hang on by a thread? Crazy enough to take off roaring down the parkway at a hundred and twenty to the sound of beating drums and wailing guitars in the improvisational night? Just like Kerouac and Cassidy before us, we had the long highway of life and all its promise stretched out in front of us--ablaze with fire! And we chased it across filthy madhouse New Jersey from the anonymous beer-soaked basements of New Brunswick to the ancient jukebox halls of Hoboken--even to the jagged salt-scarred rocks along the shores of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park--all the while our heads clouded by the fog of marijuana and the spark of an impossible dream...And maybe it was that dream that kept us going--that kept the fire alive. When did we lose sight of it? Was it was on that darkened stretch of midnight road when we finally rested our eyes and lost faith--when reality finally caught us sleeping at the wheel? Threw us harpooning into the belly of that massive sixteen-wheeler--spinning out screaming across the expanse into this life or the next? We lived through it, but somehow the magic was gone. Suddenly the friendships of old began to thin and dissipate with the smoke of passing years--eroding away like the forlorn beaches along the coast. And all the girlfriends we knew and loved so well--whose hearts had danced with ours behind a bedroom lock--began to fade away like the embers of a cigarette’s dying glow until they disappeared from memory.  

II

Do you remember what it was like to fall in love? Do you remember those soft summer days--breaking free of youth’s sapling tree--and being carried by the wind, on the wings of infinity?  Do you remember those warm summer nights that nearly stood still--for the first time discovering the ecstasy of flesh on flesh, of skin on skin, lips pressed to lover’s lips? The way her breasts, sweetly soft and immense with fruit, gently ached for the caress of rough hands, the moistened kiss of quickening tongue--as you paddled down her fleshly streams, her rivers of skin? How her anaconda legs would writhe and squeeze at the mouth of her darkened thicket jungle? And Inside!--Her midnight flower wet with dew, the sea to which all her rivers flowed? And your parched lips thirsting to drink from out that sea, did drink as two souls sewed together into the fabric of the hollow darkness--waiting only for that leap of fire, the exploding spark of inevitability...Was it all just illusion? Infatuation? A dream from which you had to awake? All those trembling nights drawing each other close and talking for hours within the calming flutter of a whisper and the cool of a lucid dream? They will try but the poets and writers and artists of this world will never find the words to truly capture that flash of serendipity in an orgasm. It is a transcendental feeling that can never be said in prose or verse. One must feel it for themselves. Feel that coiled spark of lightning--that earthquake shaking loose the tectonic plates of the soul--that pulsating stampede of furious ecstasy--perhaps it is the ultimate crossroads, that place where everything meets and parts. Where life and death, love and hate, creativity and waste share the same bed sheets for an hour’s time, or longer, on some frail and drunken night. The orgasm is the ultimate drug, the ultimate high, the ultimate release, and the eternal ache for which there is no cure. Only age, and time, and rust bring that cycle to a wane. And whether fueled by love of the absence of love, there is no other feeling like it.  

III

For now this is a strange and desperate life and no one can help you through it. No one can help you cope. No one can help you find love or happiness, or free you from the chains of addiction and self-destruction that you cling to so tightly, sabotaging your own success. All the psychotherapy, self-help seminars, and AA meetings in the world, and you can still be a fuck-up—just another miserable twenty-something living off your parent’s income. Humping the infinite money card again and again for a pack of smokes and a bottle of booze as long as they put up with it. Don’t think, just drink. Let go for now. Let weary eyes rest cemented shut and sweet siren’s words entrance and hypnotize. Let it seep into your veins--bleed into the dead seas that wither aching for its divine enraptured kiss. How marvelous is the drink that kills ambition’s dream! Why fight it? Let it attack, let it saturate! Let it warp your brain, distort your thought, frighten and confront you--till the pale and shrunken face in the mirror staring back is no longer yourself, but a stranger. And those stranger’s eyes wild and mad with saltwater fear--and that stranger’s mouth foaming sick with laughter...there will be nothing left to take away. But there will always be another drink. When all the girlfriends, relatives, and confidants have given up and left you to drown sinking in self-pity, there will be another drink close within your grasp. And it will be like the warm comfort of a hand stretched across a cold hollow shoulder.

IV

We are all alone in this life. We are all quiet men leading lives of quiet desperation in the grime of a tavern till two A.M. and judgement day--staring behind flat, gray, swollen eyes. We are all jaded women living in jaded fear of every shadow and every creeping thing that moves in the night--of every prowling jaguar ready to pounce and rupture our precious flowers. We are all isolated and wired on caffeine--alienated from our husbands and wives, lovers and brothers, friends and daughters, and even from ourselves. We see only what we want to see, hear only what we want to hear, and ignore the rest. Like the bums on the street, we once brightly burned with promise, but left tossed to the curb to be forgotten. We are all burned out, spent, and decaying in the gutter like wet rags. Our schools teach us to be big fat winners, but never tell us about the losers, the depressed, the anxious, and the insecure. Never tell us about the weak and vulnerable--the eggshell souls--the empty shards of a life living day and night longing for love and companionship. All the beggars, thieves, and prostitutes in all the cities of the world hustling to make a buck on street corners, in alleyways, and whorehouses are no better, and no worse--no more right or wrong than the rest of us--just living one day at a time. And yet we’re told to shave our beards and dress in three-piece suits--wear makeup and high-heeled shoes--hide our true selves behind superficialities to fit mediocrity’s mold.

V

Most of us like to believe in a life after this one. A life with more answers than questions to keep us up at night. But as far as anyone knows, we only have one chance to get it right. One chance to walk through the fire and come out on the other side unscathed. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve stumbled around the same streets and sewers for an eternity. And sometimes it feels as if the battle has only just begun.Young or old, the choice remains the same: Either we grasp the reigns and start guiding our own destiny, or we fumble staggering like a shooting star--snarling with flame into perfect oblivion. This is not a rehearsal, not a rough draft, there are no second chances. This day, this hour, and this minute pass but once. And even at our best when we walk a little taller, the rest is up to the whims  of wind and weather. All we can really hope for is to try to get it right. This may mean letting go the crutches that nearly hold us at our feet. It may mean falling down on the cold pavement of a strange town. It may mean standing alone in the face of laughter and ridicule. It may mean exposing a piece of your heart for another to see--or the fear squirming in the whites of our eyes. So much of our lives we spend lying in wait. Waiting for what? For the next drink, the next time we fall in love and share a salmon sunset of a kiss in tiny corner of the bedroom sky? The next sinking stone of a moon, and the next rising Phoenix of a sun? The next time darkness falls and we withdraw alone again into the abyss, to roam the restless streets of the mind--waiting? So much time waiting for sparks to strike, for rusted gears to spin. It’s in those fractured moments of pain and those trigger-happy moments of joy that we really live and breathe and know we are alive--as we wait for that fire to burn again. 

Westfield, 2013