crepuscular mudwrestling by matt moseman

sadly it isn’t quite going badly,
but neither is it sublime,
I fear I fall back on the rhymes like a crutch
sometimes when it’s hard for the lines to fill up--
but if I can grind along until I find
a meaning, or even a profound lack of it,
at best, then I might lay down for a rest
and stop trying to test everything out.

if everyday the envelopes are not pushed
across the desks and onto the carpet
or the tile or the hardwood or the linoleum floor
then I will get antsy under the covers,
forcing me to turn to serial onanism
to tire out that reeking sense of incompletion;
feeling like I might have got ‘em if I could have reached ‘em,
can’t stand to think I never tried.

never enough to pull something
down from a high shelf or a ceiling, no,
then I have to rub whatever it is in the mud on the ground.

nothing can be on top of anything;
I must walk barefoot, it’s easy;
I have hard feet and I love mud between my toes and under my eyes.

Comments

[pete pick]

hey, i like this, matt. almost realism. it reminds me of the charles bukowski theory that you can only keep 'them' at bay by banging away on the typewriter. in the first verse i would excise 'out' from the end, and see how that works for you. also not so sure about 'profound', but i can't really think of an alternative suggestion.

[Kevin Jackson]

like this much matt... "reeking (cut: sense of ) incompletion" is an eye grabber
you'd have enjoyed a meditation workshop i did recently.... "cease the endless impossible quest to do, for in doing there is only the surety of disappointment when it fails to bring satisfaction, if it does not spring from a real need, and luxuriate instead in the bliss of being" (think i remember it right - there may have been another modifier before bliss) - k