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Harvey Goldner
Blinking Christmas Tree Lights
A poet who has no real friends,
though he may win prizes and influence idiots/critics,
is a piss-poor poet who is losing her mind.
With no one but himself to talk to,
she has an audience far too small and ignorant
to be of use as an instrument of corrective feedback.
As he approaches the wide open gates of insanity,
while her spelling is often alright,
his punctuation gets sloppy or minimal;
her grammar goes wormy; his syntax tangles up
like a fish line; and her diction
stinks—an ancient Greek newspaper in which
he's wrapped an Alaska king crab.
It adds up to a willful obscurity
(sour grapes mostly).
It's as if she were saying:
"I ain't got nobody to dance with,
but that's quite obviously because
"I'm so much smarter and deeper
than all those folks, pretty girls and rich boys,
who seem to enjoy my absence so much, and not
"because I'm a self-absorbed shit."
He might as well be writing for
Martians, but not even them.
A real good friend of mine,
a tall blond fellow who actually is
in communication with certain Martians,
tells me that, among themselves,
Martians converse by means of various strings
of blinking colored lights,
much like those found on some
Christmas trees. And when speaking to
earthlings, more often than not,
they use no words or signs at all,
but operations such as those which you call
car wrecks, lucky breaks, and fatal attractions.
When they do stoop to use words,
Martians pack them in poems like this.
Harvey Goldner
I live in Seattle. My poems have appeared in The Adirondack Review, Amarillo Bay, Chelsea, Curious Rooms, Exhibition, Exquisite Corpse, 4th Street, Iota, Pinstripe Fedora, Poetry Midwest, Puerto del Sol, Pulsar, Rattle, Shampoo Poetry, The Sun, Wicked Alice, Willard & Maple, and elsewhere. My chapbook, Her Bright Bottom, was recently released by Spankstra Press (Seattle)
When I was a child, my lesbian aunt, Suzanne, would spend a week or so every summer at my family's vacation home on Lake Wenatchee, here in Washington State. This was before the era of motorcycle helmets, and Suzanne would arrive on her blue Bugatti, her red hair streaming, flaming. While tossing back straight shots of my father's precious scotch, she would mesmerize my twin brother Phil and me by reading aloud her favorite poets, chiefly Elizabeth Bishop. Eventually, my brother Phil became an alcoholic & was killed in a motorcycle accident, and I began writing poems.
harveygoldner333@gmail.com
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