#keepthepenmoving

[writethefucknow]

rewind # 354 yr 1

Experimental Daily Write/Don’t Edit/Share 

The Poem                                                                                                                

the weather is hot on the back of my watch                                                                                                                                                                

By Charles Bukowski                                                                                                                                                                                                                                the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s who is gifted with 3 balls but no heart, but you’ve got to understand when the bull goes down on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else, and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency for in a crap game you may be cutting down some wobbly king of 6 kids and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check, and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn? not I, Henry, and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes, maybe you should have stuck it into something else like an oil well or a herd of cows. I’m too old to argue, I’ve gone with the poem and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch round after round, but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser or any other fool full of medals and nothing else, or the first time we read Dos or Eliot with his trousers rolled; the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s, but you know what they say: things are tough all over, and I remember once on the bum in Texas I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate and the crows came down half-dead, half-living, and they clubbed them to death to save their shells but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and stuck out their tongues and mourned their dead and elected new leaders and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap. you can only kill what shouldn’t be there. and Finkelstein should be there and my watch and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad they are supposed to be bad and if they are good they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor fight to be fought, but still I am sad because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands, way off course, not even wanting to be there, two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me and asked me what time it was and I wouldn’t tell him, and later they gathered them up for burning as if they were no better than dung with feathers, feathers and a little gasoline, and from the bottom of one pile a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me. it was 4:35 p.m.

Read The Writing Excerpt Here

Then- rerun 2014

Content warnings: nonspecific trauma references/childhood brief and non specific mention of suicide

1

You can only kill what shouldn’t be there. That’s what I think when I make my list of the people I always wanted to kill but couldn’t. Fortunately most of them are already gone but I still feel that twitch itch want to pull the trigger feeling about some of them. People who make negative space in the world and subtract children from all the equations like a math problem on the board; the children are the chalk dust when the black board gets erased.

2

You can only kill what shouldn’t be there. Self destructive tendencies. Black mold. Parents who aren’t parents. Dictators with their death squads. Corporations that are eating the world. Strange urges on the top of tall buildings.The smell of alcohol in the air, being sweated out by someone you love. Kill a cigarette, a drink, compunction, the ants that trail into the kitchen, sewer rats, roof rats there are entirely too many rats, the people on life support who are already gone, the woman who needs to die who is trying to die but death won’t quite come for her, kill the pain with another bowl, kill the desire that used to warm everything to a sweet delicious thing but now seems like a bad idea, kill the apps that help us forget to be human beings in the real living world, kill the dangerous things, smelt all the knives that don’t have practical use, bury the dead and the shame too, kill the spider, the animals that have gone rabid (the people are harder to catch) kill the enemy, the women who carry their children into strange bedrooms and leave them there like an offering on an alter, the false gods, the real gods,

I am blasphemy walking today. I used to be a pacifist. Now all my songs have violence woven into the major chords. It’s a phase I tell myself. Rage is important I tell myself. Fortunately I am tired these days and the real things I want to kill are all dead already and I have help when the thing I want to kill is me.

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the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.”

― Harlan Ellison

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Today- January 3 2021

This writing like the writing I want to invite you to do is messy. Run-on sentences. Breaks the Grammar Rules and sometimes is misspelled.

I invite you to Just write. Try 12 minutes or if that’s too scary try 5. Make a list or a sentence or a paragraph.

Pick a line from the poem or a line from the writing. Pick anything at all. There are no rules to this. The rules are for later when it’s time to edit. For now just jump in- you can’t do it wrong.

Pick anything. Look around what do you see or what do you hear? What is the light like in in these days when it gets dark so quickly. What is the air like in these strange days at the beginning of 2021. Take a line from a book or a book title. Write about your favorite piece of fruit. Your favorite first or last love or lust. The thing you are most afraid of.

You can say I’m afraid to tell you or I want to tell you or they want to whisper...Write anything please.

It’s a necessary act- to make a thing in the space that is waiting for you. If it’s calling to you, answer. Be kind to yourself.