BOOMER

BOOMER  — a found poem

What is a found poem – “A found poem is a poem created by taking words, phrases, and sentences from existing texts (like newspapers, books, signs, or websites) and rearranging them to form a new poetic work, essentially creating a literary collage that gives the original words new meaning. This method, similar to Pop Art, uses pre-existing material, and poets decide on line breaks, rhythm, and presentation.”

I received this letter from a close friend a few years ago right before he died of heart attack alone in a small room in Houston Texas. It seemed a fitting epitaph, at least the start of one, not just for him but for an entire Era, my own. We came from a small town in Southern Indiana. We spent our youth together from elementary school through high school. We joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. I didn’t hear from him for forty years and then began communicating through periodic phone calls for a decade before he died. The text is mostly verbatim. I have done nothing but create line breaks to generate a poetic rhythm when the text is being read and made some minor grammatical corrections to make reading easier. I’ve written eight books of my own poetry and taught literature and writing at several universities. But this is the only time I have found “a poem” that didn’t begin in my own deranged psyche. I did this as an elegy for him more than anything, and because his personal words create a sort of pastiche of my generation, one that, it many ways was similar to Gertude Stein’s “une generation perdue” after WW1, confused, lost in a whirl of changing social mores and in a struggle for a workable value system that would allow us to survive. I confess, many of us are still struggling. – Jim McGarrah

                        BOOMER

I have always wanted to write my own obituary.

I mean, shouldn’t you know yourself better

than anyone else does? Isn’t that your first obligation

to the world, your responsibility to people you live with

and around?

I’m just spit balling here.

I can’t write my own obituary because I’m alive,

I can’t write it if I’m dead. So, maybe it’s a memoir,

an autobiography, an examination

of a whole generation of idiots and saints.

Maybe idiots and saints are the same thing.

Anyway,

I just bought a typewriter for ten bucks at a pawn shop.

I might have bought it cheaper if I felt like bargaining.

Judging from the clientele in that pawn shop,

not many customers need anything involved in spelling.

I’m writing this whatever you want to call it to explain

to the curious how an under achiever turned out so fucking crazy.

Today is April Fools Day, April 1, 2022. I am a seventy-four-years-old,

ex-marine and a retired gold pro. Did I just write that?

I can barely say it to myself. A retired golf pro.

What the fuck is that?

Is retired a good substitute word for broke?

I’m a retired golf pro just sitting here in fucking Houston,

watching it rain. My clarity of mind seems pretty good today

even though I ran out of pot and cigarettes two days ago.

I have eighty-three cents in the bank till my social security check,

which is nine hundred and thirty-three dollars, arrives.

I always buy groceries first,

usually Ramen noodles, dried beans, a chicken,

a couple of bananas, peanut butter, some onions, and potatoes.

I don’t drink alcohol, but after I pay my rent, whatever is left

goes for more weed and cigarettes.

The pot serves to help control my rage

over the state of the society in which I live.

I’ve been infuriated since I left Vietnam,

but that infuriated feeling increases the longer I live.

I think it has to do with politicians and corporations

as groups rather than specific people.

I hesitate to go out in public unless I’m high.

I know there are plenty of decent folk out there alone,

but put them into politics or in a corporate office

and they form a selfish, evil mob.

I’m honest enough to admit that my mind is not filled

with a host of original thoughts. Most of my personal beliefs

have been formed by a wide range of useless experiences

and studying the teachings of great philosophers

like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, whose preeminent principles

—I’m tired of this back-slappin’ isn’t humanity neat bullshit—

And

—We’re a virus with shoes.”—

remain foremost in my thoughts.

These guys remind me that humans are a stupid species

manipulated by our own inability to reason rather than feel.

Who is dumb enough to believe all opinions are equal and all facts are relative?

Yet, we actually have a flat-fucking-earth society alive and well in America.

7% of our population believes you can drive off the edge of the planet.

Of course, most of them live in the South and claim to be Christians.

My mother and father were named Mary Jessie and James,

and I had one sister who died four years ago long after my parents.

Being born on April 1, 1947, allowed me the privilege

of acting as a fool pretty much all the time without

ever having to prove whether I was or I wasn’t.

My head was covered with tight black curls.

My nose, flat and wide, spread across my face,

as if smashed with a hammer. My eyes are green,

my eyebrows bushy, my complexion dark, and my ears

a bit too big for the rest of me.

This sounds like a horrible combination, but I have been told

by several women after they snorted a line or two of coke

that I’m quite handsome when you put all the parts together.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950’s, I used to tell people

I was black and had been adopted. You couldn’t get away

with this kind of thing in the 21^st century, but on my birthday,

I’d relate a story to my friends that James and Mary Jessie found me

in the orphanage outside of our little town and took me

to some high-dollar dermatologist. He bleached my skin white

and cut half my dick off so I could pass. Horrible, yes.

Cultural appropriation, yes. Racist, yes. But, it was April Fool’s Day

and my town was full of white fools.

There’s actually people here in Texas that would still laugh.

That about sums up my family tree, I guess.

Except to say that my father was the strongest son-of-a-bitch I ever knew.

He was six foot-three inches tall and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds.

Boy, could he swim.

After Johnny Weissmuller won those swimming Olympic gold medals

in 1928 and started making Tarzan movies, he came to Seminole Lake

on a publicity tour for one of the movies. My dad was a lifeguard at the lake

and they decided to have a race. Dad left old Johnny in his wake.

At least that’s the story my grandma used to tell. She was a real cunt.

My mother was the one with the brains in our family.

Everybody comes from someplace. To quote Buckeroo Banzai,

“No matter where you go, there you are.”