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The DeadBeat Poet - (Poem)

1.
I am The DeadBeat Poet
I am The Pathetic Conundrum
Born in Literary Affirmation under Duress
A spore of acedemic mold spreading throughout the Global house of knives
A black plague claiming inspired & infected lethal Injected lives
A DAMN Tormented soul defecating & vomiting up Axioms and aphoristic vernacular...
Quoting Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Burroughs but That's not the full gamut I regurgitate...
Mary Oliver, Cohen, Atwood, Spencer, Service, McCrae, Lowell, Plath, Neruda, Wolfe, Dickinson, Lorca, Angelou, Crane, Poe, Collins, and many others...
Defending my decision to Live and Breathe the Spoken Word, like if it was my Gospel...
But there is only one King James Bible...
Still I defend poetry like it is all I know.
And sincerely speaking, the angst that is bestowed
Unto me from years of spending time in books
Defeats my idiosyncrasies regarding my knowledge
And appreciation for a powerful yet poignant verse
Of poetic rhetoric, plausible to redirect an Asteroid
Heading towards Earth, causing The Artist but not me
To save the planet, landing back on Earth from Mars
With a giant SHOCKWAVE, landing with The Might
Of Twenty Thousand Eagles brooding over the Devastation of another lost home...

2.
Rambling onward, and inward
Imploding then exploding...
Breath after breath...
In a Metronome Timed Insurrection
I am a DeadBeat Literary Buckaroo
I am a DeadBeat Literary Buckaroo
I am a DeadBeat Poet
Poor and uneducated
In Real Life circumstances
That I feel ostricized to dance
And dance and dance and dance
In an akward romance with myself
Taking a concussion of a hit
On my wary mental health
Submissive and regressive
Indicative with a message
I shine only in certain
Arenas...

I am NOT a Jack-of-all-trades
Not a construction worker at heart
I love building, rhymes but not bridges
Widgets but not housing blueprints
I am hinting that I am not a whole well-rounded
Individual but rather self-deprecating
And always hesitating
To get my SHIT
Together
Kind of person.

3.
Then it is here I must ask a sordid question?
Do I write my POETRY like the classics then?
Or modern or post-modern troubadors?
Or with a hint or trace of Eliot?
Traditional in austere
A DeadBeat NOT REVERED
But sitting here
Smoking cigarettes?
About to lose a bet.

4.
What is a sordid question
but a mirror with a cracked grin,
a riddle that refuses to be solved,
a bruise you press just to confirm
you’re still capable of feeling?
I ask myself daily if the DeadBeat Poet
is a persona or a prognosis,
a costume stitched from borrowed lines
or a skin I can’t shed without bleeding...

I ask if the world ever needed
another voice howling into the void,
or if the void simply needed
another body to swallow whole.
And still I write,
because silence is a coffin
and I have never been good
at lying still.

5.
I walk through the alleys of my mind
like a scab unworthy of peeling...
Preaching to dumpsters and ghosts,
telling them the gospel of the Almost,
the religion of the Not Quite,
the sacred scripture of the Nearly There.
Every poem is a confession
I didn’t mean to make,
a testimony I never rehearsed,
a plea bargain with the universe
to let me stay one more night
in this collapsing cathedral of breath.
Ink stains my fingers
like a crime I can’t wash off,
and maybe that’s the point—
to be marked by the thing you love
even when it refuses to love you back.
That would explain my TurtleFinch scars...
Enamoured with my NECK.

6.
Some nights I dream of being whole,
a person with edges that meet cleanly,
a life that doesn’t leak through the seams.
But morning always arrives
with its unpaid bills and unmade promises,
its cracked coffee mugs
and its relentless reminder
that I am a poet first
and a functioning adult
somewhere near last place...
(SMILING)
I trip over my own expectations,
spill metaphors across the floor,
and sweep them into stanzas
because that’s the only way
I know how to tidy up my existence.
Call it survival.
Call it ART THAT FARTS...
Call it whatever keeps me breathing.

7.
I have loved and lost
and loved again in the wrong direction,
chasing constellations that were never mine,
mapping galaxies on people
who were only passing through...
(*Sigh...*)
Heartbreak is my unofficial residency,
my unpaid internship with the divine.
Every wound becomes a workshop,
Every scar a syllabus,
Every goodbye a thesis
on the fragility of human architecture.
But even shattered glass
can catch the light,
and I have learned to angle myself
just right
to make something shine.

8.
I am the DeadBeat Poet
because I refuse to die quietly,
refuse to let the world decide
what is worthy of breath.
I am the Pathetic Conundrum
because I contain multitudes
and contradictions
and half‑finished blueprints
for a self I might one day become.
I

O.A.