For the young who want to

A poem by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Copyright 1980, Middlemarsh, Inc.
from THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE
Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Fair-Weather Prayer by Stacey Haas

We looked like angels
in our hospital gowns,
waiting on doctors like fathers
to save us from ourselves.

Wanting to be freed
from whatever encrypted disease
was our genetic destiny,
we put faith in a savior
to change it.

We sat on bended knee
with bated breath for a savant
in a white coveted coat to come,
but he's in and he's out
in a matter of minutes,
while we're left with a feeling
like we missed it.

We get the pills without a problem
like a script without a story,
scrawled in hurried cursive
we weren't meant to understand.

This is treatment without reason
leaving half the time
not knowing what is wrong.

When confronting
the unmendable by medicine
we're taught to pray for miracles,
to trust in the invisible
as if death were avoidable.

But the truth is we've collected a debt
and nothing is owed us but a bed
of worm turned earth to go to.
Does that scare you?

The dividing cancer cell is not evil
rather, so adept at it's own growth
it forgets the confines of it's host.

Humans should understand that the most.
Think of everything we've outgrown;
toys, countries, taxes, kings.

When reminded of mortality
we make a steeple of our hands
and whisper promises
we will not keep.

An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film by Richard Brautigan

People cannot figure out why he is with her. They don't understand. He's so good-looking and she's so plain. "What does he see in her?" they ask themselves and each other. They know it's not her cooking because she's not a good cook. About the only thing that she can cook is a halfway decent meat loaf. She makes it every Tuesday night and he has a meat loaf sandwich in his lunch on Wednesday. Years pass. They stay together while their friends break up.

The beginning answer, as in so many of these things, lies in the bed where they make love. She becomes the theater where he shows films of his sexual dreams. Her body is like soft rows of living theater seats leading to a vagina that is the warm screen of his imagination where he makes love to all the women that he sees and wants like passing quicksilver movies, but she doesn't know a thing about it.

All she knows is that she loves him very much and he always pleases her and makes her feel good. She gets excited around four o'clock in the afternoon because she knows that he will be home from work at five.

He has made love to hundreds of different women inside of her. She makes all his dreams come true as she lies there like a simple contented theater in his touching, thinking only of him.

"What does he see in her?" people go on asking themselves and each other. They should know better. The final answer is very simple. It's all in his head.

from Revenge of the Lawn

the everyday occurrence of miscommunication

isn't feeling special feeling better than the rest? or is it more about maintaining a separate sense of self? most people think they're different from everyone else. in my experience, they are usually wrong. we mostly follow a pattern of sameness. if you are a true whack job, congratulations. the mold must never be sated.

to varying degrees we each feel disconnected from the masses, but it's just an adopted flirt with displacement. we don't really want to be alone. just away from the stereo static muffling madness. we each imagine a barrier between us. would this exist without language?

clever of an invention it may be, there are many cracks and chasms in speech. and just as many tunnels and twists in listener's ears, convolutions queuing to occur. deeper still, ingrained in our brains, we have a slight to moderate difference of association. depending on culture, demographic, background, age. meaning can get lost anywhere. it does all the time.

when i say the word dog, what do you feel? what if i say pit-bull instead? does it change your reception or is your reaction the same? words can trigger moods ranging from sedate to enraged. there exists in the prefix 'mis' something sort of strange. see; misfire, mislead, mistake.

the slipping second

i've heard both atheists and religious people say, you only have this life, don't waste it. waste, they warn, is like decay. it will eat you. clock hands, slowly but always, keep creeping. second by second. day by day. should the clocks all stop, the sky would keep time, measurable by sunlight. the only thing that matters in measurement is relevance. people can handle increments. it's the abstract infinite that is too vast to grasp. small doses are what keep the populace sane. short term goals seem reachable. pay day isn't far away.