This next poem I wrote while flying from Helsinki to Tallinn Estonia
in a solar-powered dirigible under a blue moon, which of course means
the second full moon in a single month, and actually I had met and
fallen in love with a daredevil acrobat who wore a black leotard,
whiskers, and the ears of a cat, and to sort of prove my love I was
hanging with her by my feet from the cabana, I think it’s called,
you know, the giant people basket that hangs down under the helium-
swollen belly of the dirigible, and so at the time the blood was
rushing to my head and therefore away from my other head, and
suddenly I saw with new eyes this strange waif with whom I was
hanging out, and I began to wonder what had led me to that point in
my life at the precipice of death, and why I should be sharing it
with one who cared so little for me while one who cared so much was
an ocean away, and that wondering is of course the warp and woof of
poetry but I didn’t have a pen or paper on me, hanging as I was from
my toes over the warm, salty Baltic; in fact, I didn’t even have my
laptop or a lap to put it on, but I did have my cell phone which I
whipped out and used to text-message the poem to my wife as a kind of
confession, if you will, although I guess I don’t really confess to
anything in the poem or even reflect in any profound way on life or
death or the inanity of lust; it is hard to say exactly what the poem
is about if you haven’t already figured it out, except to say that
it’s about something we’ve all experienced at some point in our
lives if we’ve attended a few poetry readings, and probably even
most of us have done it ourselves although perhaps now that we are
(hopefully) more self-aware the memory is embarrassing or even a
little bit painful, but it is nonetheless not merely ego that led us
to do it, although surely that plays a part, but also the genuine cri
de coeur we each sound, in our own way, into the void, our plaintive
howl at a vast, random and frightening universe, the cry that says
“look at me, I am here now,” the desperate need to connect with
another soul that drives us to say things we should have put in the
poem in the first place or, perhaps, that were better left unsaid,
when all we really mean is, “please love my poem,” which is called
Long-Winded Poetry Introductions, Don’t They Just Drive You Crazy?
Michael Schein
Michael Schein is a father to daughters, husband in a vibrant quarter century marriage, friend to many (especially cats), scribbler of poems and novels, and more. Michael’s work appears in such euphonious journals as Slow Trains, Chrysanthemum, The Ledge, Penitalia, Pontoon, American Drivel Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and in the anthology, The Art of Bicycling. His poetry has received several awards; most recently, he has been named a finalist in the 2007 San Francisco Writer’s Conference Contest, and he will be nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his poem L-W PI (DTJDYC?), which appears in this issue of RSP. Michael is the author of two historical novels, and will buy beers for agents or publishers.
