Naked Poets

http://charlespoet.podomatic.com/entry/2015-03-28T01_10_06-07_00

I like to think we’re all naked poets, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Too many supposed poets taking the easy way out and only writing about what they do not know instead of what they have experienced in this life or a past life or even a future life on another planet or deep underground.
Too many writers filtering their slaughterhouse words because they’re afraid they will be rounded up and brought to a death camp to be experimented on for all of their ineffectiveness.

It’s just my opinion of course and maybe being a clothed poet makes more sense in these days of lost irony where one’s poetic license has been traded in for a Starbucks gift card.
I’ve even been told clothed poets make better lovers which I think is total bunk because no lovemaking is worth its weight in gold fillings if your intellect is not writhing in ecstasy when your partner checks your oil and replaces your brake pads.
Naked poets have more of a tendency to go the extra mile long after the wheels have fallen off and we’re cooped up in some nondescript truck stop in some nondescript rest area where all of the nondescript people grunt like sows and are led around by a nondescript Christian God they believe they’re on a first name basis with.

Maybe I am not even a naked poet and am just another loser writing the losing end while the ghost of Nathanael West reaches out to me from beyond the grave and The Day of the Locust mocks me like all alienated and desperate works of unparalleled genius have a tendency to do.
Perhaps I’m just another Dylan wannabe who thinks they’re breaking all of the rules when no rules in fact exist and Dylan was right on target when he said “I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.”
Put on your windbreaker, get on your bicycle and ride around the promenade like any other legend who knows how it feels gathering no moss while standing in front of the crowd completely naked and bereft of any second or third nincompoop notions.

I wish I could take off my clothes and write this poem in the buff but my mother is in the dining room reading the newspaper and I know she wouldn’t get it.
It’s odd how poetry seems to more often than not divide us rather than bringing us together and to a more enlightened jumping-off place.
Too many writers tamping down their black powder verse for a more reserved and less confrontational tone. I believe it’s time we throw caution to the freewheelin’ wind and write about what’s going on. Pulling no punches while pushing the river and celebrating those who dare to break ranks with their counterintuitive  claptrap prose while spilling their precious bodily fluids down on the killin' floor.  

Charles Cicirella
3/27/15