Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Who Do You Read?

“Writers Write.” 

-Paul Farmer 

Aaron was in awe of Trevor and Brandon when he first met them he had never met people with the ability to quote endless streams of poetry at will before and he thought that their poetry was phenomenal. They must have given him over a hundred books of poetry during that first year, he devoured them all. The first book Mona brought to Aarons for him to read were ‘Why Cats Paint’ and ‘The Principia Discordia’. In turn he loaned her ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘Kill Your Boy Friend’.

So you can understand when later he was somewhat skeptical of her judgment when she began to recommend books of poetry. He didn’t identify with her sense of humor. He wasn’t sure if she even had one but if she did it seemed sort of goofy like the rest of her. But he wasn’t going to say that to her, at least not yet not as long as she was still fucking him.

Wallace Stephens was Mona’s favorite poet, and it was she who turned Aaron on to the beat writers and eventually even Bukowski. Trevor and Brandon gave him books of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Li Po, Robert Bly, Seamus Heaney, William Blake, Tim Siebles, Jack Myers, James Wright, Miklos Radnoti, it was only after studying with them for a year that he began to realize that they were aping their favorite poets, mostly Lorca and Neruda with some Bly thrown in just to spice up the batch.  

Aaron thought of his brain like a biological computer and had taken as one of his many maxims, the credo garbage in garbage out. He didn’t watch network television. The TV now in his possession being a relatively new purchase for the kids video games and film not movies. Every book he read he was careful to be sure that it wasn’t a complete piece of shit by going by the recommendations of friends and book reviewers because he was a bit compulsive about things like this in that once he started to read a book no matter how bad he was going to have to finish it.

As far as watching movies went he wasn’t interested in films about terminal disease having had an uncle with cancer he didn’t find the subject interesting entertainment, the same with suicides and similar subjects that he had too intimate a knowledge of or too personal and experience with horror. Comedies and action adventure were his favorites for the moment.

-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.