Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: People are Stupid

-Terry Goodkind 

Did you know the original title of that song by the Doors was people are stupid but the guys in the band convinced Jim to change the last word from stupid to strange? It was the stupid questions that people ask me all the time that made me say that. You know what I really hate it’s when there’s a riot somewhere and some white person feels obligated to ask me why are they rioting.

I resent that question as if there was some sort of a riot gene in black people so that all you had to do was walk up to the first black person you saw and ask them why there was a riot. Fuck if I know? Do you see a brick in my mother fucking hand? Am I running down the street with a stolen TV in my arms? Am I?

Do you see me throwing Molotov cocktails into people’s places of business? No I’m at work, trying to do my fucking job. Do I come up to you when you’re at work asking you if you know why a bunch of inbred red necked bigots drug a black man down the road behind their fucking pickup truck tied to the bumper with a fucking tow chain? No, you know why I don’t ask you that question because you’re here at work with me and you don’t have any more fucking idea why some crazy mother fuckers doing that shit any more than I do.

How would you feel if I assumed that just because you’re white you have some insight into the mind set of every mindless ignorant racist on the planet? But if one more person asks me some stupid question like that I’m gonna have one man riot right here at work.  

Lenny Bruce In A Poetry Work Shop 

Why? Why was he here? Why? When he knew that it was a Bourgeois con. As crooked as a lepers cock, three card Monty or a pyramid scheme, writers workshop my black ass. It was just as corrupt as the tax laws for the rich, tithing and the collection plate at the church, infomercials that promised that you could learn to get rich just like me by investing in real estate just like me those mother fuckers got rich selling bogus tapes and books filled with empty platitudes. Confidence men who held seminars where they charged hundreds of dollars a head to join their real estate guru at a cheesy resort somewhere and listen to him tell the dullards the same shit he had told them in his books and on his tapes and videos.

The writer’s workshop the creative writing classes were all on par with the vanity press. But no one dared shout the emperors butt ass mother fucking naked man! What the hell was he doing here? Sitting in this room filled with these clichés, the dyke fresh outta the army majoring in women’s studies, the rest of the fashionable bohemians, mostly English majors, who were now housewives, high school teachers, community college professors, accountants, computer geeks, the odd lawyer and all manner of corporate cubicle monkeys pounding the keys trying to learn to write. Shakespeare has nothing to worry about. Not a single one of these wanna be greats had any gift for writing anything more profound than a technical manual on software development.

Each one of them read their great works as if it were the most powerful piece ever written in the English language. He’d had more powerful bowel movements. He feared the veil that hid his contempt was slipping. He kept his mouth closed when it was time for comments on how each writer could improve their work after it was read by one of the students who hadn’t written it. The instructor always asked what was good about the piece and then what could be done to make it better.

Aaron thought only of arson and mass suicide during these painfully bad hack sessions. Other than his own work he never spoke during the work shop especially when he was asked to offer critique criticism or comment on what worked in his classmates writing. The only things that he liked were the endings not because they finished strong but because it was over. And the only thing he could think of that would help make their writing better would be if it was shorter. These people were all doomed. There was no hope for these people because they didn’t understand the facts, the nature of reality. The facts were that you could not teach someone to be a writer. Either you could write or you could not.

The people who took money from these poor misguided suckers knew this but since they themselves couldn’t actually write either they had no scruples about swindling the talentless hacks that paid to attend these workshops. These people didn’t even know how to live. How were they going to write? They spent their lives cowering behind the sheetrock walls of their apartments and tract homes in the suburban sprawl that ringed the city like a tattooed track mark. The English majors who wasted most of their time in writer’s workshops and MFA programs learning to write by consensus disgusted him. Aaron didn’t believe in art by committee. He had absolutely no respect for the opinion of the mob. Whether the mob was a bar full of drunks semiliterate simians or a room full of English majors attempting to write by commission.

Aaron noticed that these people had no real life references to anything. Everything that they read and everything that they wrote was all literary references. And because they had no actual references from their lives in their poetry they assumed that everyone else’s poetry had no life, but only literary references. For them this is how it was done. Poetry was about regurgitating what other famous long dead poets had written before. This dead poets society stuff was not only tolerated but encouraged by the professors.

Aaron didn’t mind them too much until he was in workshop with a group of them after he had been at it writing for almost two years. In the workshop held in the same room on the second floor of the used bookstore where he attended his first poetry reading nearly two years ago. Here they all sat waiting for a master, a savior, a literary messiah to come down from on high and reveal to them the secrets of the great writers. The published writer, the working writer, the writer who didn’t sit in classrooms with their face in the crotch of the next writer, the writers who refused to workshop their poems because they knew that a room full of sycophants could not improve on their work. Because they knew what he knew, that you might as well try and teach pygmies to dunk as teach these people to write. Personally Aaron was betting on the pygmies. What he needed was to see these people for what they really were to lose his respect for every schmuck with a sheepskin this was the perfect place for it.  

It was when they began to talk about his work in class, the pieces that he wrote as assignments, that he noticed it. Every line that he wrote they assumed that he was quoting this poet or referring to that novel just like they did. The idea that he was talking about things that he had actually experienced was as alien to them as Greek was to him. He quoted his friends whether they were writers or construction workers.

He referenced graphic novels, wrote poems lamenting the fate of Superman, and referenced video games like Diablo let them believe that he was referencing Dante’s ‘Inferno’ which he could never seem to get through. His style was influenced by Ginsberg, Rumi and Blake. But it was also influenced more if you want to be honest by Reverend Mackey, Richard Pryor and his father as great a story teller as there ever was but they wouldn’t know who the old man was if he dropped his name and they wanted to feel like they understood him, that they knew where he was coming from as a writer. It was less scary if you imagined you had some insight into the author’s world. These people were all blind.

They didn’t really want to see anything or hear anything or experience anything. These were the typing tourist of the world these were the people who just hopped on the bus turned their head to the right and clicked when commanded. He was tired of telling them by the time it was over that he never read Steinem, Plath, what’s her name a contemporary of Hemmingway and Pound and Elliot. Gertrude Stein? They all thought that ‘The Waste Land’ was the greatest poem ever written. He thought they were all insane to have read ‘Howl’ and not have a religious experience in poetry.  

How could he be expected to let these jackasses workshop his poems. These were the people who went to camp when they were kids. These were the people who rented limousines, tuxedos and suites in five star hotels, these were the people went to the prom while he worked all night; dish washer, bus boy, fry cook, waiter. These were the people he despised as a child, nothing had changed his feelings about them in the intervening years. He went to Mudea’s spent his summers in Tyler, he thought the prom was for pussies. So he worked his job as a waiter at the Pizza Inn on northwest highway prom night.

He remembered that Roxanne, the prettiest girl in Mister Horne’s civics class, who he met the year before by accident as he walked through the students center singing while she worked at the kiosk that sold school supplies shocked demanded he tell her who told him her name when he told her he didn’t that he only knew two Roxanne’s the original one in the novel by Cyrano De Bergerac and the one Sting was singing about she laughed. She lived with her grandmother in a house next to the XXX drive in and on prom night she made her date take her to the pizza inn for dinner so that he would have to leave him a big tip to impress her. Nothing could impress a girl that lived at that address.

These people with their porcelain smiles a false eyes that never gave anything away surrounded him now had been his enemies then and were his enemies now as they tried to make his poem into useless pap smears like their own, gutless, spineless, ball-less, humorless, soulless, impotent efforts. It was fortunate for them all that he recently stopped carrying his pistol and taken a vow of peacefulness passivity otherwise he’d have to kick everyone of their big fat squishy asses.

Lucky sonsabitches. The only honest compliment anyone ever said about him was watching him was just like watching Lenny Bruce. Richard Pryor loved Lenny Bruce and he loved Richard Pryor. Every one of these assholes thinks that everybody else here is a no talent ass monkey, that everybody here is delusional about their alleged talent and what the future holds. They know that all of these other people will die impoverished anonymity they understand that to write poetry is to beg to be ridiculed beaten when caught. That most of the people in the room are suffering from some sort of mental disorder. They pity those other poor bastards in the room who will never make it. They knew exactly what he knew that he was the only one that’s going to make it. He knew this the way a man climbing a mountain with another man tied to a rope behind him knows that if the guy behind him falls he’s cutting the damned rope. 

-about the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.