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Cheap Sleeping A trailer truck in a rest area at four in the morning. Headlights dim slow, hissing diesel knocks oil soaked piston one last push on the crank case---- cools. The driver climbs down and goes into the weeds. No one else here. A mosquito buzzes at my ear and I swat at my head much too hard like a kid smacked for putting a hand, not just a finger in the pies before they were set knocking everything down smearing hot blueberry filling like the squashed guts of an insect and cherry dingled-berry red blood smeared on the wall. So now I'm without you. It had to come to this. Sleeping in the car with the windows closed. The only way to sleep without bugs. Just think I was under pine trees and a big yellow August moon. Cooked potatoes in a coal fire, had rooms of furniture, a piano on a polished oak floor. There is the music of my breathing in this self made oven. Too tired to go on this way. © Michael Largo |
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Commentary: There is a vortex I've been too, a place which exists with it's own self-destructive properties - a pull of gravity magnified, a circulation of air that squeezes the lungs into gagging lunges for breath, for an even beam of soft light - cool mountain breezes. This poem arose from a transitional stage of life, when I had no ability to stop myself from destroying the things that were good and wholesome. At the time I was married to a talented musician, living in New York with a new born child. A fifth floor walkup looking out over a busy street. I had just finished a year of teaching English in Harlem to students too distracted from the ruin to understand. I was drinking then--with a vengeance those days, writing poetry, reading around the city. And then, I remember, one morning, at around four am, I just decided to go. I had to stop the noise, shush, quiet the demons. I packed some things into a beat-up eight cylinder Cutlass, had about five hundred dollars of cash and took off across the country. I wish to tell you there was a happy ending - an ending, yes. Cheap Sleeping is when your soul is trapped in its own creative oven. Survival is a coin toss. My novels are placed against the grid of EB White's Elements of Style, but poetry has been influenced by the stream of consciousness writers and the grammar of e.e.cummings. Yet, a good editor can always make them better. I've had a lot of jobs (English teacher, editor of New York Poetry, field guide for a nature conservation center, East Village tavern owner, deckhand on a sea-going tugboat, freelance photographer, video producer, and certified builder), but mostly I've found starting some business for myself the best way to feed the kids and have time to write. My first novel was published twenty years ago. It was made into a movie, but I squandered the opportunity and the cash. I write because I have to, I guess. I'm happiest when I'm in a project - a long fiction. I've written five complete manuscripts, but only recently took a deep breath and started the publishing ordeal. I must have written four hundred query letters and solicited advanced comments from other writers. The process was very draining - you've got to have a tough skin and a 'screw them' mentality. But it's usually just persistence that wins - talent has something to do with it, I guess, but it's mostly pounding on doors. Michael Largo Bonfire contributor |