It’s been a while, but I’m still here. I was working two shit jobs until I quit the second one, now there’s just the one. In the meantime I’m spending a lot of time in my backyard inside my head, making frequent trips back and forth to Milwaukee (prospective move), sleeping late and waking up confused, etc.
I did manage to finish an issue of my zine, though.
All you faithful subscribers should start checking your mail in the next few days. If yr not one of these, pick up a copy at Quimby’s or mail me 4 bucks at:
Matt Whispers
1743 N Mozart APT 2
Chicago, IL 60647.
Here’s a snippet, the first section of a poem called Work Poem.
I am seated on a stack of crates in the alley behind the restaurant in chef’s whites, smoking, shoulders slumped and dead, staring down into the grit and grime that collects here. I can hear the muddle of the Division Street farmer’s market around the corner as it reaches its mid-afternoon peak. It is a Saturday and I have been here since the sun came up. I look deep into the puddle that collected after the 20 minutes of hard rain–how brilliant and contained, the reflection of criss-crossed wires and blue and building tops in the shallow murk mingling with gum, sand from spilt sand bags, and way too may cigarette butts–and with my formerly-grey-now-turned-to-grey-black sneakers teetering on the edge of this new lake, it is a near-perfect image, one that puts me at ease for this moment, that I am tempted to try and photograph as if that could capture any of the resonance this smoke break holds, but know that it would fall short, would not speak to anyone of the overwhelming sensation I have, that even this poem is a fallacy, trying to crunch in all the complex and resolute things flying inside and around me all the time, to squeeze it into words like “melancholia” or “defeat,” or “the sheer weight of it all.” No, sometimes things seem too beautiful for it to matter if anyone else sees them.
