John Tustin
I began to write poetry during the brief age
Of the electric typewriter.
I always had a pressed-in callus
On the side of the middle finger of my left hand
Due to not holding a pencil or pen properly
Ever since I could remember
And around the age of eighteen
I was writing so much that my hand
Could not keep up
With my mind.
Notebook after notebook filled with the tiny words.
I sat down one night
At the dining room table with my mother’s electric typer
And I taught myself to type,
Writing poem after poem,
Hour upon hour
Until the sun woke up
And implored me to do something else
Until night fell again.
Being self-taught,
I type improperly to this day
Just as I could never correctly hold a pen.
Unteachable me.
I taught myself to write, too.
It came from nowhere.
It came from nowhere, those nascent rhymy poems
Like bubblegum pop without the hook.
Layer upon layer on endless pages,
The spigot turned on at fourteen and it took a woman
With the soul of a jackal to turn it off twelve years later.
For a decade, at least.
Then eighteen years old,
Failing at every turn
As I balanced a girlfriend who didn’t want to be my girlfriend
And friends who were less than friendly
When my back was turned
I typed it all out on fabulous naked pages
Slowly scrawled to hatchmarks of blackness.
In time she was gone.
Slowly, I withdrew from most of them.
They did not complain.
I reminisced about the times I misconstrued
So heartily
And I wrote.
I wrote.
I moved into my own place and I spent day after day working the grind,
Night after night drinking,
Not drinking,
Talking to myself or silent,
But always with the typewriter buzzing on my lap
As I hunched and punched the keys with abrupt and harried fingers,
Letting all of that poison seep out of my head
And through my hands
Onto sleeping pages come to life.
The poems are gone now, all of them, but I remember snippets.
I remember titles:
A Drunken Rant of a Letter
Poem Full of Women
I’m a Bachelor
Manic Depression
Gypsy
Anna….
“Anna
Anna Banana
That’s what I call her
With embarrassed laughter
Voice trailing after
Neck like a swan
Eyes like the dawn
Lips so discreet
Must taste so sweet
If only they were offered up to me
Naked as a sacrifice…”
All the words jumbled
Tumbling out of me
In the heat and the beer-scotch haze
And the solitude
Of an inhibited youth.
Type it.
Tear it out.
Retype it.
Retype it again.
Add. Subtract. Like it was important to anyone
But me.
I was insane.
I wrote more than I read and then I wrote
As much as I read
And then I read so much
I needed to find the time to write.
All the while Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen,
Tom Waits
On the Walkman
And the clack clack clack of the keyboard
So like a train chugging to the next anonymous city.
Clack clack clack clack clack.
I hit the keys hard.
They were rifleshots.
Steinbeck and Salinger
Merged into Ginsberg
And Whitman and then
The Nirvana of Bukowski!
I read Love is a Dog From Hell in one day
And it helped create 500 poems of lust and travail.
I was opening my heart, I was letting my veins flow
Bloody
Along the pages
In a room alone, waiting for a phone to ring.
The phone would squat on the wall in silence.
All the time,
Clack clack clack clack
As the phone laughed in
The squalor of so many empty rooms
That sat silent
Except for the mocking laughter
And the
Clack clack clack clack.
A long-haired madman with the beard of Rasputin
And the face of a delicate child.
I churned out the pages,
Put them in a stack next to me on the sofa.
The snap of the paper being plucked from the cradle,
The snick snick snick of an empty piece being rolled up
Like a bullet in an empty chamber.
Bang bang bang!
I wrote them and then I read them over and over.
When I was not working I was reading.
When I was not reading I was reaching out
To the air.
My words, my poems, they were my friends.
And Anne Sexton was my friend, John Fante was my friend,
Hemingway was my friend.
Bukowski and cummings were my friends.
I drank with them and wrote with them
As I awaited life to change.
The sun would set, the moon would rise,
The heat would release from the asphalt and then
I would type all the shit I scribbled down while working,
Elaborating the plaintive cries
Of a man who was a boy,
Wanting only to be wanted.
Night after night sweating naked with that typewriter my only friend:
Brother my brother.
Churning the pages,
Piling them up.
Being me.
I almost killed myself that summer
But then I found love for a little while
And when combined with the words in my head –
I had everything.
For a little while,
At least.
She is gone now,
But the words keep arriving,
Sometimes at the oddest times.
I welcome the words.
“Clack clack clack clack”
Is what I still hear in my head
When I sit in the dark
All alone
With my headphones on
And expel my peculiar poison
Now
On a page
That is not really
A page;
Expelled from a heart
That is otherwise
Not worth a damn.
The keyboard makes this little expeditious typing sound
But in my head –
Clack clack clack clack clack.