Poetry

I'm not really a poet, but occasionally I'll write a song. Typically, these songs don't see the light of day - they are usually bad - but more often than not, they just sit unfinished in a notebook, hidden away. When I was younger, much younger, I and my pseudo-intellectual friends would sit around, smoke joints and cigarettes, drink copious amounts of coffee, and have long very, very meaningful conversations about all things pseudo-intellectual, from philosophy to politics, physics and psychology, basically anything that started with a "p", or made that "s" or "f" sound while using the letter "p". Part of that exercise involved writing long passages in a common journal called a "Bitch, Want, and Stroke" book. The concept was simple: we all lived in, more or less, the same house, most of the time, and the book was a way to say things that might be awkward or uncomfortable to say in person, in real time. Sure, there were times when we would move back in with our parents, or shack up with a girlfriend, or even get our own place, but we would spend a great deal of time together, often weeks or months, at the same house. The book was the low-tech version of Facebook or MySpace, a way to keep in touch, abreast. There was ranting about people not doing their fair share of the vacuuming or eating the last yogurt, compliments given and favors cashed in, and the random bit of prose or poetry. Sometimes an excerpt from a song, sometimes something original, usually in response to a jilting or a perceived injustice; maudlin, bad poetry, brimming with teenage angst, seasoned with bitterness, garnished with narcissism, littered with adverbs.