Quite Simply an Ordinary Day

Okay, now you are bitchin' about the drinkin' and the writin'. Let me be a hero for thirty seconds. I went to work (on my only day off) after church that is, where I singlehandedly brought the age of the congregation down by 10 years. Then I got in a car accident on my way to by my dad a present, but it is neither a holiday nor his birthday. Then I kicked f#$%^&g @$$ on an ice rink against the best team in the league to keep us undefeated. So now, after three beers after the game, half a bottle a wine, and now I am drinking Scotch STRAIGHT from an F#$%^g bottle because that is what my favorite authors Haruki Murakami does and Raymond Fucking Carver did (someone once willed me a grave between him and his living wife Tess Gallager, side note) so in great honor of the drunk poets, as the Brits say, I AM B100DY PISSED! So he is a poem, composed drunk of my fat keister, just for you are ears ( and i know i am going to someone feel really wierd toomorow. So if you need a hero either count me in, or pass me off as a raving drunk.

Lots of Drunk Love,
Hadji aka Matt

Poem

It is Coming.

Really, like the second coming, by Auden that is.

I think is was Auden But I am not sure now,
but what I do know is that I am on my third scotch
and that most girls either
think I am a cute intellectual
or a solipsistic jerk. Either
way I am a happy drunk,
until the dude who surfs,
(how do you act cool
when you surf on Lake
Michigan) makes out
with the girl I love
so now I am brokenhearted
in that "Hope College sophmore
I don't care I still made out with you"
kind of way, like cookies,
or that is what my youth paster
called it (ya know,
it) or at least some thing
like it, but is wasent it
so I can hardly call it it
but in Wyckoff Hall, it didn't matter,
anything that resenbled it, was, well
you know, it. Like going out to coffee.

But if she orders a moo at JPs, forget it,
especially when she wins the songboy auction
and gets you for a dollar, cheaap,
or even holding hands in chapel,
its out of the question. But you can
still do your homework together.

But then you graduate and a few years
later, you like in a big city (or more
likely a suburb of one) and you do like
Kerouac prodicted, we live in houses
and just watch TV all day and forget
that SOMA and IT like in "Brave New World"
ever even existed more like "Drunk Old World"

(did I ever tell you drunk poets
that i live only two miles from a bar where Kerouac,
Cassidy, and Ginsberg used to get drunk? I do, cause Kerouac Married
this chick from my hometown and they got devorsed after
like three weeks or something, which is kinda like
how I quit my job to stay in vienna for three weeks longer,
(really long story by the way))

So anywhay, I guess
we were at the part where we are playing darts
in this old bar where Kerouac and Ginsberg
used to get drunk like we do, and from
the local arcavist, I figured out which booth
those Beat poets drank at, so now
we drink there too,
and we play darts there
like it was going out of style,
and now we are approached
by some self-proclaimed avante-garde
girls from Grosse Pointe (where everything
desearves and extra "E", like "sex E") but we pair up to play darts
like it was as cool as the old
days,

but we didn't really care about darts,
it was just an excuse to make passes
like a bimmer on lakeshore,
and so we did,
and so we did,
like making passes,
was going out of style,
and so we did.

whatever happened to drink, drink, drink?
write, write, write?
post, post, post?

Stephen Saul on Exhibit in UK

Just wanted to get the word out! My poem, "Stone Heart," is on exhibit at the Leeds City Art Gallery (UK) from Oct. 20, '05 to Jan. 8, '06. The exhibit is named "Something of the Night: imagining the city, 1875-2005. Painting, Photography, sculpture, new media."

The gallery contacted me by email and asked permission to use "Stone Heart," among works by other artists, in their upcoming exhibit. What a rush! I think I'll get drunk!

You can read the poem on my site at stephensaul.com.

Oh My Gosh Josh, It's Fiction!

So, as always, the preface. I don't normally write fiction (i am a drunk poet but not drunk at the moment). Not only that, I do not normally write fiction that is dialogue heavy. I feel like I am drowning in a lack of what people should say, and where they are going with the conversation, probably since it lacks plot whatsoever (but then again, so did the entirety of the sun also rises). I think if my dialoue seems like a normal conversation, and I have a couple of scotches, I can get over this whole "Where is it going thing?" Anyone have a roadmap i could borrow?

One beer two beer shakesbeer
Hadji

Outside St. Andrew’s Hall

“Hey, hows it going?” Ben said propping the door to the alley with a cinder block.

“Fine,” said a hipster high school guy who was sitting on a broken bench in the alley next to St. Andrews. He sat smoking a cigarette through a frown.

“Can I bum a light from you?” Ben said with a gesture that showed his own
cigarette in hand. The kid lit the cigarette.

“Mind if I pull up a cinder block?”

“Go ahead.”

“So,” Ben started then exhaled smoke. “What brings you to this fine alley on a Thursday?”

The kid looked up, looked back down and mumbled. “I was supposed to meet someone for the show.”

“But they didn’t come, did they?”

“Or they went in without me, I arrived on time, but they had the tickets. She
probably doesn’t care one way or the other.”

They both sat silent for a minute. The kid pulled out another cigarette and lit it. “You know, things sometimes just shouldn’t happen. I have been waiting to see Death Cab for like a year, and they finally come, and I am going, but it doesn’t happen.”

“I know what you mean, its like that one song where the lines go she looked so beautiful but it didn’t mean a thing to me. Except it is her who doesn’t care this time,” Ben said.

“Yeah, it’s like that, and it hurts. But you just can’t do anything about it, someone who feels like that. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense, so it doesn’t make sense to agonize over it all.”

“You got it. I had something happened to me like that.”
“What happened?” the kid asked.

“Well. I travel a lot. And she didn’t like it and started meeting people while I was gone. I figured as much. But I didn’t do anything about it cause I had convinced myself that she was never important to me. She was, but it was easier to just hide in an excuse.

“I did eventually confront her, but it was too late. And that made things ugly. That’s when we said all the things that shouldn’t have been said and so on. Now a great way to end a great relationship.”

A man stuck his head out the door and said, “Ben, almost time. About ten minutes before Pedro wraps up their set.”

“Thanks Dave,” Ben said from his cinder block.

“So you are Ben, from the band?” the kid asked.

“That’s me.”

“You seem like a normal guy.”

“I am just like any other guy. Listen to music, fall in love, fall out of love, like baseball, usual stuff guys often like.”

“I mean, well, I always think of musicians as larger than life, but you just seem to live.”

not being in a poetry workshop this semester means i haven't been writing lately. sad, i know. but i have a bunch of things i wrote in prague this summer and i'll just keep posting them periodically until i start writing again. this was an assignment where we were given the first line and had to write from there using some sort of stanzaic form. i think i did alright. feedback please :)

Upstate

Whenever I come here, it comes
to this—you, sipping gin

and tonic in the afternoon; me,
trying to make a metaphor of it all.

I watch watermarks forming
where our glasses meet

wood grain and the table between
us is a tree trunk, partly

hollow. Roots ensnare feet placed
toe-to-toe on wood floor, sap

dripping from inside out, sticky
but not adherent. I keep

looking for leaves, fuzzy buds,
magnolias. We search for branches

strong enough to climb, support
us both. Tree rings count

the days we’ve been reaching
around it, rough bark

peeling, interrupting our
fingers, barely touching.

Bonfire

i have witnessed
the jagged cliffs of sedona
open wide
like a leprous hand
and reach upward
to a burning sky
and i have seen there
the moon's brooding face
like the face of g-d
and i have wept there
i have died there
and lived again
in haggard shadow

i have drank
from the waters of babylon
a jewish man
an arab man
a free man
a slave man
a saint
a prophet
annointed
martyred
crucified and resurrected

i have stood
at the wind blown doors
of empty temples
heard the cries
of mulahs priests rabbis
echo
from floor to ceiling
i have seen their ghosts
like limp rags
sat in the silence
of their vestiges

i have seen the fear
in soldiers' eyes
and looked away
and i have seen it
in the stiffness of their stride
i have felt their courage
their conviction
i have wept with them
and for them
at their gravesides
i have stood silent there
with their families
been in their hallowed homes
touched their cherished things
i have drank their whiskey and wine
listened to their stories
told by women who loved them
and i have sat where the tide
rolls heavy
the sky electric
glad to be free of them
glad to be alone at last
in the wondrous bliss of nothingness

i have seen the man who cannot hear
the man who cannot speak
the blind man the madman
the prisoner of his birth
i have read about them
in all the holy books
the expiation that is their suffering
the exquisite blessings
that await them
in the distant arms of g-d

i have shouted at it
laughed at it
from the rooftops of flood waters
drank it away with port wine
fled from it with mahler whitman
like solomon
i have written of it
from the ruins of night
only to sit
spent on my throne
in the early light of dawn

and i have stood
upon their parapets
amid their spears and arrows
raging like a madman
only to sit dumb
upon the smoldering fields
where their fallen lay
and then flee to the forest
thick with fallen leaves
a breathless fugitive
my bonfire
striving with the darkness
flashing like neon
across my hoary face


stephensaul.com