Short poem. Update. Other things

I'm neglecting this blog,
never a good thing.
It gives me a sick feeling
like my stomach is dropping out of my ass
or I just licked a battery.
Ultimately, I'm not neglecting my life
which is the most important thing.

That poem was about things. I remember a teacher told me a long time ago, "Never use vague words in poems. I want to see what your saying and describing." I was an asshole back then and thought, "Man, that's total bull shit. I can put whatever vague word I want in a poem." I wasn't trying to piss the teacher off. I sent him an email a while back. Mentioned graduating with an English degree. Mentioned getting poems published and he said he was proud. He rememebered me having long hair and I said my hair was long-ish again.

Right now I'm at work and the Canon Imagerunner won't shut up. I hear the feeder wheels spinning their layer of grease off, it's a stupid sound. Outer space sounds that never stop. Like robots having sex with metallic dicks.

That last paragraph was a great example of what not to do when you're writing. What a positive thing to tell an entry-level writing class. I remember one day when a teacher said "You need to know the rules before you can break them," and I said, "Writing a poem doesn't have rules." I felt so smart.

Here's another poem:

When you eat jerky,
you don't think of it as a former animal.
Texture of carpet, like eating a dried tongue.
Dried tongues sealed in a black bag.
A Native American on the front,
hand resting on the trunk of a rotting tree.
Wild dogs with sparse fur licking the
points of his shoes.

The former animal
never thinks of itself as potential jerky.
He or she stands in knee-deep water
swatting an orbit of flies with its tail.
When a man comes from the barn waving a stick,
he or she can't help but follow the rest of the cows
to a clanging bell.