Blurbing. Starbucks. Etc.

Dan Bailey sent me a copy of his newest chapbook East Central, Indiana. If you haven't read Dan's work, that means you're just not trying hard enough. Reading Dan's work adds years onto your life. I've never had anyone personally send me a chapbook before. It's an exciting feeling. What that tells me is that Dan values my opinion, or maybe he just likes knowing that I'm reading the things he writes.

I work at a place that prints and publishes things, so I have this crazy urge to print off Dan's chapbook and design a cover for it. I could even bind it and put covers on it. I'm going to supress this urge. Plus, that would make Dan some kind of third-degree-of-separation customer, and I don't want to think of Dan as a customer. This makes me think of him wearing a suit. I've seen Dan in a suit one time before. He was drunk and I was high. We read our literature in front of an audience and everyone was excited. People made faces, for most of them because they couldn't help it. I read first in a low voice and kept looking at the same two faces in the audience over and over again. It felt like I was at a museum staring into an oil painting. The overhead light drowned out everyone's face and they were condiment swirls on a paper plate.

Dan's poetry always has an element of sincere energy and frankness that coils itself around your feet like a huge snake hiding in knee-high grass. It chokes your face and you die, but it doesn't bother you because dying is something we'll all have to deal with eventually.

I'm not saying Dan's poems are an atomic bomb. Dan's poems don't allow you to stare at the page and convince yourself that what you're reading doesn't have the opportunity to exist. He creates realities and worlds with tangible things. People with skin, dogs with balls, houses with four walls and chimneys that belch smoke into trees, and those threes shudder when the wind blows. Children clap their hands in Dan's poems and moms and dads drink coffee with the lights out.

I can sit here right now and tell myself that people in our world don't live on the moon but in i want to get drunk with you, Dan says, "we grew up in small chambers on the moon/i think that was when everything was a bit lame." My opinion is that Dan probably doesn't care at all about his work embodying some kind of aesthetic truth or value. To me, this collection calls attention to existential reasoning. That's a good thing.

When his poems end, some teachers would say, "They end on a sharp image." Nobody really knows what that means. I'm sitting here finising a Dan Bailey poem, and I tell myself, "The best way to end a poem is to prepare the reader with an image that will make them want to read another poem." In my life I've read enough authors to fill stadiums, but many of them only once because they cannot create a circle with their writing.

Dan makes circles. They're planets orbiting something in space that nobody can see. They're large enough planets that no single human being can explore them or know what they are beyond reading them, so you're forced to keep going and going until you either put the book down or sleep. Sometimes Dan's work makes me think about that one picture where all of those sets of stairs keep turning into themselves and the person in the picture looks lost and confused.

If Dan's chapbook was faxed to me, I'd wonder where it came from. Then I'd continue to read it until I got another fax.

**

I never had Starbucks until my senior year of college. Home was the only place I ever had coffee, and most other things that're served at Starbucks just dont' sound appitizing.

Now, I work right next to a T-Mobile and Starbucks. I can go next door to pay my bill every month, and if I ever get hungry, I can always just get a cookie or something to drink. There are only a few things I like on the menu and they're all frappucinos. Most of the other things taste like ass-flavored water swimming in chunks of ice.

**

I'm listening to Tom Petty at work and it's fantastic. Nobody is in the store and I can sing Honey Bee as long as I want. Thanks to my Dad, I grew up on Tom Petty. The Beatles, too. And Buddy Holly, but Tom Petty was always my favorite. On Sundays before football would start, we'd organize all our little helemts on top of the TV and I'd pick out who I think would win each game. I always thought the Jets would lose. I hated them when I was five. Now, I'm pretty indifferent.

His songs are always sad, even if the lyrics aren't. Tom Petty always sings like it's the last thing he'll ever do. Somebody tall in long coat is standing behind him with a gun, and as soon as he does his last strum, the back of his head is all over a wall. Tom Petty's Greatest Hits was also the first CD I ever got. It was a gift from my dad's parents when I was seven. I still have the CD sitting in a box at my mom's shop. The case is cracked, and the disc is in really bad shape, but every song still plays, except Something in the air. I hate that song anyway, so it doesn't bother me.