Poetry Award

Recently, I finished third in 'The Undergraduate Academy of American Poets Prize' category for best single poem for U. of Cincinnati. Here's the poem, posted again.


The Conceit That Unravels Into Meaninglessness

In the meantime, I'm living here,
keeping the house in order for showings.
Everything, from the paintings on the walls,
to the furniture on the patio,
has been tagged for sale.

I've been here for weeks.
Just today, I answered the door,
told telemarketers so-and-so don't live here anymore,
made coffee, smoked a half-dozen cigarettes,
had a beer, and walked the rooms trying to hear a sound.

A friend once told me
(First, prefacing the advice
by liking it to tombstones
above dead bodies)
what she does when walking into a strange place:
she imagines each face
to be a face of her past--
the young girl who looks up to her mother to speak,
or the teenager with a mouth-full of braces bagging groceries.

But what happens when the faces inside the rooms I enter are owned by dead people?
And I find myself walking past photographs
of this deceased elderly couple,
and past their son's collection of paint-by-number pieces
hanging on the walls.
I catch glimpses of myself
from the small mirrors on every wall.
No one is coming here unannounced,
so I can act this way.
Everyone went west after the funeral
and I find that I can't remember
the original placement of things.

I know the date
only from the newspaper.
I leave the shower running
and fall asleep nude.
Nude, and asleep with the shower running,
I am the pretension of a misplaced object
that has become a conceit
which unravels into meaninglessness.

***I don't know. Fine enough. The school has a ton of good writers, good poets much more refined than me. Especially the women, or young ladies? I don't know the expression. But for the most part, the girls dominated the contest in each category: short stories, poetry, playwriting, essays, and compositions, etc. I don't know much about the female writer, because I don't read many female authors. But from what I've observed of women, they are less, I would say, troubled . . . or less rough around the edges. They remember, or keep in mind, the forms of composition. But a writer is a writer. Men have Faulkner, women have McCullers. I cannot choose and it probably doesn't matter.

So I'm going to keep writing, and hopefully my writing gets better. Better scope, less serious, more humor, less measured, and more creative. Recognition doesn't matter. When you're ready, you'll get recognized. Even then, it doesn't really matter. I let it go because

there is a quick and sudden excitment, then you do it all over again, but hopefully better with the added experience you keep in the back of your mind. And it is continually improving, getting more refined. Exhausting, this pursuit of improvement. Putting the pieces together, the concepts you've read and learned ardently. Eating pages, eating books, eating music, eating films, buying, adding, improving, expressing it all in a long, drawn out single breath. I let it go, with the hope that it will come back when I need it. Fall lazily into my lap when I least expect it. It's not patience, because I'm not waiting or expecting a thing from writing, or from you.

In my world, cleverness does not exist, nor do expectations. Meaning unravels into meaninglessness. You begin, then get tired. Rest back into meaningfulness. Hopefully, eventually, I rest less and less, and watch less television.