I wrote a poem a few years back about my first love and called it “Typewriter Scroll.” when we were still together I owned an Olivetti typewriter and had taken a ream of computer paper (the kind with the holes on each side to guide it through the printer) and just started typing like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road. I poured out everything about her that I felt. Our relationship had been tempestuous. We were young, we drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes, and were intelligent without wisdom. In a word, we were foolish. Our first drunken sexual encounter resulted in pregnancy and an abortion. She wanted to hate me for it, but couldn’t, but I lost her trust after that.
At that time I had aspirations to be a writer, but not enough experiences to write anything other than imaginative fiction. The typewriter scroll was my first attempt at writing about myself and what I thought and felt. I had read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer around that time and wanted to follow his direction.
During this relationship I read the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. I was quite fond of A Season in Hell, but “Spleen” from The Flowers of Evil with its death imagery, graveyard symbolism, and love like a “worm eating a corpse,” verses I fell in love.
All the confusion and lawlessness these days forced me to record my cover of The Clash’s “Kingston Advice”. It made me reconsider my MAGA follower “Smooth Brain” song lyrics. So I decided to cleanse my palette and try combining “Spleen” with “Typewriter Scroll” and now I am working on “Export A Blues” (named after the Canadian cigarettes we used to smoke when we had extra money).
I’ll be uploading it through Distrokid for distribution, but I will post links for it on Substack.
Fuck Cristobal Colombo. Work for peace
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