Hey all back with another installment of Poets Like Us. If you dig it please consider sharing it and contributing to my ko-fi. Every bit helps and since I’m on the road right now as I post this—it will help us get through the rest of this journey!
Quit your job. Sell your tv. There’s a thousand ways to die but no one ever said it had to be close to home. All the same people haunt the same bars and cafes, talking about the same girls and the same boys and all the same shit and the same moon lights the same asphalt corridors where you’ll stumble the same path home and greet the same twilight air with the same resentment and suffer the same way your parents did. There’s a wind that tempts the eager— finding you the next time your boss shorts you on your pay or when the landlord keeps beating on the locked door, hell, like a Will-o’-the-wisp creeping in through the backyard— you know this wasn’t what you were meant to be doing. Your friends grow up, get married, have children, get into politics but you are still staring at the sky looking for more.
Print some poems into a book, throw some clothes into a bag and take off. Hitch rides with other Doomers trekking across the I-70 to outrun the oblivion of obscurity. Read poems anywhere they will let you. Sing your blue collar bar poems in dive bars from Pittsburgh to Dallas, in art galleries, in laundromats, in creperies in Houston, in vegan grocery stores in Michigan City, subway cars in Manhattan and bluegrass festivals in Salina. Sell your books for gas money or trade them for beer and weed. Never get a hotel room. Meet friends and they will let you crash on their couches. Or throw a blanket down and crash under the constellations on a foreign field. The whole open mic poetry scene is just a couple dozen people with smartphones. The holy trinity of the road is hosts providing the space, the audience with nothing better to do and you roaming from city to city to add some of that good jazz.
The chapbook is what keeps the car moving. The goal of every show is to hit them with bangers and wow the audience enough that you can sell enough chapbooks to get to the next city. You will. If you hit them with the truth and do the damned thing then people will help out— see not everyone has the freedom you do. Not everyone can quit their jobs but by helping you get on your way they become part of your story. Maybe they can’t ride the asphalt highways but they let touring poets crash on their couches, they bring them around their cities and heaven is going to be full of those fine folks. Every city has saints waiting to feed and lodge the traveling poet darting around the bad-side of town on their quest for adventure. They’ll send you on your way bright eyed and with a full belly or with bloodshot eyes and a hangover that’ll only ever be cured with herculean doses of shitty rest-stop coffee.
In the morning you’ll be packing up the car and heading off for another dose of novelty. As you cross the Mississippi River past the sprawling leviathan of East Coast industrialism, the lands become green and the houses become seldom and you are farther away than anyone in your neighborhood has ever been. The interstate is a great American serpent slithering between corn fields, cowtowns and the cities sprinkled along the great asphalt sea. It’s in those cities where you’ll disembark and find a bar before the reading, never a sports bar or chain, you’ll always be on the search for the sketchiest bars because they have the cheapest drinks and you know you didn’t get here drinking water. In the midwest in the early afternoon the only people in the dive bars are winos, burn outs, old fat republicans, macramé queens, poets, and occasionally the most interesting people in the fucking world.
On the road you’ll never say no to a free beer or to adventure. You’ll smoke weed on the roofs of bars in Kansas City and party with local legends trading stories and laughs for whiskey. The wind hits different when you’re in the bed of a pickup truck with a group of strangers doing ninety trekking towards the Ozarks. The night feels different when you’re paling down streets you’ve never heard of with friends you hadn’t known until then barreling towards a party where you’re the main attraction and riding that high until the road calls for you again. You’ll be following the sounds of percussion and crashing punk rock shows in St Louis or Philadelphia or wherever there is a beat that has to go on. You’ll fall in love every night with cities you’ve only read about, with strangers who become best friends, with women who will whisper sweet poems into your ears, roll you joints and hang onto you until the birds sing you a new morning’s greeting. And sometimes when the moon hits just right and illuminates the giggling faces of your
comrades you might even forget to look back towards home.
Poetry tours are 5 percent readings. Ten percent partying and eighty-five percent driving through cornfields and those drives are what brings you together. You’ll talk about life and love and sing pop-punk songs at the top of your lungs barreling through God’s Country like a bat out of hell. People will learn your name if you leave an imprint and when you come back through again they will bring their friends— who will bring their friends— and then it becomes an event for you to pass through. You could be back home playing video games or scrolling on your phone but instead your screaming poems at a basement show in Philly or popping into a cafe in Buffalo. The country is like a flower waiting to blossom and when you’re ready for it the whole damned thing could be yours.
When you run out of money you’ll go back to that hometown of yours. You’ll find another bullshit job and go back to living that normal life. Talking shit with the same people about the same shit but you’ll feel even more removed. They’ve never seen the turnpike tundras of Colorado or driven through the dust-devil ridden plains of Kansas. They’ve never been in a different city every night for months. The novelty of the road changes every subsequent chromosome in your DNA. When you leave you put yourself into exile and come back a stray. You’ll work your job and make your money always looking out the window to the sky and remembering the way it used to warm your back. You’ll long for those nights of adventure every time the moon tucks its head beneath its bed of clouds.
Until you quit your job and get back out on the road again.
If you dug this let me know in a comment! And if you want to help the journey my kofi link is right here
Have read this post like 3 times already and it's so good it makes me want to hit the road and never look back.
Ride on. Write on. Poets coming to a tour near you this summer.