The birthday present that eats hands

This gorgeous moleskin, it is turning my prose to pedestrian garbage. Stubbornly I attack its pages again and again, carrying it around in my satchel, whipping it out in cafés and bars, holding it in my hands as I pace the chocolate shop where I am kept as a helpless prisoner with no wages, taking orders every so often from customers whose tongues run the full circuit of their lips while I place their goodies into wrappers and bags. Packing it to the beach, pulling it out when I am sitting in my special chair at home and SHE the slavedriver is immersed in her own podcasts. I hid a lucky coin in its pouch. I baptized it with gin and ocean spray, and blood from my thumb (that was an accident), and some truly delicious green salsa that sprayed my birthday present in a pattern resembling a modest virgin. Introduced my birthday present to the throne in our bathroom where I am accustomed to scribble limmericks, rock and hoot. AND YET all these rites of passage have rendered it impervious to my words, like a well-waxed slicker on the stone cold body of a dead john doe.

It is sucking me dry. I have given it my precious time and my words and nothing sinks into it. It is the worst birthday present ever.

SOS SOS save our souls.

The birthday present

Birthday present was this moleskin I decided to use just for poetry, since my poetry output is like five good sob’s a year, I am a terrible poet. Let the following lines, inscribed upon the very first pages of my birthday present, stand as evidence:

Balls: you know them Jesse
like the veins of a caramel corn muse
or pathways better off on dirtbikes
stroked only with the grain
patterned after the chalky bits out of Babel
towers of petrified ents
striding out of Gomorrah
large toes pit pattering fr

You get the picture. Also I hate writing longhand bc I have this sloppy panicky italic that does not come off the pen fast enough, I think it interrupts the rhythm, the automaticity. Poems though, freeform, are easy, not sonnets. Try that again: If freeform poetry is easy written longhand, sonnets should be typed on a laptop. If I want to write a decent Shakespearian sonnet, Bill, I am going to need a word processor, ntm a ton of other modern comforts lined up, like cookies and a heating pad for my swivel chair, or else as a shitty actor on the stage / Fear shall put me off my lines.

Writer’s block following the acceptance of a birthday present from Satan

I threw away (intentionally got stolen) my fav pen bc I thought my artistic block was my fav pen’s fault. This ten-peso beauty that/who had never spluttered or faltered upon a page had begun to have physical difficulties, like my grandmother in her seventy-second year, scratching dry against the page despite being shook or twistered in a corner.

I abandoned my pen. I abandoned my sweet stylus on a post office counter, after which ten of my favorite of all time stories were impossibly plagiarized out of my personal files by a man named John Kidd out of California.

And my other writing has not improved.

Damn pen

Damn pen was cursed
I swore
like a person.
Never knew what was inside
organs bones
vessels for ink
tho it wrote in blood
it was banal
it chafed against the paper.
Usually I destroy paper with fire
with words from my pen
so
I put the damn thing down.
It was not my day.
I put it down on a public counter.
I left it for some stranger to catch.
My pen was like the flu.
My pen was death from ten thousand scratches.
My pen was Tlaloc but when the rain would not come.
Though I know now
I am still infected
the man as picked it up
the damn pen
stole it in fact
off the post office counter
now calls himself a god
John Kidd
publishing my writing
in dozens of esteemed reviews
of poetry
while I stagnate
birthday present like an unstrung banjo on my knee.