3 HUGE LIFE HACKS TO REIGNITE YOUR STREET POETRY C/O PSYLOCIBIN AND A HEAT STROKE!

This week I retreated to a West Virginia campground looking for Answers to a recent existential crisis. Like any sensible seeker, I decided to eat an eighth of mushrooms over the course of a 10 mile hike through the boiling sun.
Obviously I would’ve preferred a windchimed forest sanctuary, a place to sit still, a notebook, and no exercise. But the campsite was washed with late summer vacays: screaming kids jumping in the creek, leery-eyed retirees with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags on their giant RVs, chatty rangers who couldn’t tell I was a haunted young man in need of some privacy. I’d have to make a run for it. The only spirit quest available was 5 rocky uphill miles away, at a mountain overlook used for a WV Public Television antenna known as Signal Knob. So I girded my third eye and bit by bit mowed down the moldy old shrooms, taking off with a couple turkey sandwiches, far too little water, and no idea how out of shape I was. A bit of an extreme measure, sure, but these were desperate times.
I’ve been in a terrible poet for hire funk the past couple weeks. There are plenty of reasons. Typewriter poetry’s becoming an oversaturated punchline; I didn’t come up with the idea; none of my street poems would be accepted to the Kenyon Review; half the time the people paying me have never seen it before (you’re basically getting paid for the idea of it, which is not yours to profit off of)… But most of all I read some work by a couple writers I thought were better than me. (“Compare and despair,” I heard it called today.) So I threw a cringe-fiesta with all my old poetry and promised before I kept making an ass of myself I needed to full-stop and reflect. Maybe it’s necessary to criticize my work this way, or maybe I’m just falling back in the cozy self-flagellation pattern I feel safe in. I don’t know. But I need to know. So no writing right now — just waiting, gathering, searching. And psychedelic hiking.
A disappointing discovery: it appears high-intensity exercise more or less cancels out a mushroom trip. While wheezing up that mountain I felt a little loose and loopy, there were no astral plane ascensions. When I stopped to catch my breath all the leaves and rocks and my sweaty legs started swirling a bit. But that might’ve just been the heat stroke.
Still there was a suspension of the usual mental static, buoyed by some big endorphins, and it helped.
They say it’s bear country up there and that you should sing or ring a bell to scare them off. So the 6 hours or so I spent huffing through the mountain I had a long, loud conversation with myself. Every other sentence started with “JOE, PAY ATTENTION!” and was punctuated like a rapper’s adlibs by guttural howls of dehydrated agony. (I might’ve been tripping harder than I give myself credit for). There were no bear attacks. If anyone heard me I’m sure they stayed far away. And by the end of it I might’ve come to some resolutions.
I was going to LIVE MORE — I had been such a street poetry junkie lately, if I wasn’t out writing I was skulking around exhausted, spending boredom money, wondering what the hell to do with myself. Nothing new to speak of!
Except there has been lately —there was the raging party last weekend at a West Virginian chicken farm, there’s an amateur porn film festival in Baltimore tomorrow, and I might try hunting down Gary Busey on his current book tour and sit at the feet of the master. We need material. In the first aphorism of book four of “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche says of his new year’s resolution, “I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito. Cogito, ergo sum.” It’s one of my favorites of his. Even after ascending to the Mt. Olympus of all possible Earth-vocations, I still have to live, for I still have to think, for I still have to invent clever lines for my corpus of live typewriting.
I was going to READ MORE POETRY. Not how I usually do — bored and spoiled and waiting for a chance to hate. I will mine the prominent poets for technique, like a spy, like an enemy. It doesn’t matter if they’re good. It matters if I can steal something valuable. Maybe this won’t work —maybe I can’t overcome my romantic instinct that all literary scholarship is falsehood® — but at least I’ll try.
I was going to WRITE FOR MYSELF FINALLY. And here we are. This may be turning into a dumb self-help listicle but fine, whatever. There’s a lot about writing I need to relearn — things you don’t get the opportunity to practice cranking out white-knuckled snapshots on anything and everything for a stranger’s short attention span.
And finally I told myself I’d write FREE POEMS the next time I went out to type. (Though my thin wallet is side-eyeing me as I type this…) I’ve often thought of this option as a kind of Big Red Button, especially on the poet-soaked streets of New Orleans. What a wrench to throw in everything. I’d be mocking the living me and my friends and my frenemies were making on Frenchmen St. I’d transcend capitalism! If I know I’m writing something for free I often feel so much more access to my life than when I’m hamming it up for my 10spot. Who cares if they don’t like it? I get to be bad as I wanna be. It’s like training wheels for basic artistic bravery.
In the tiny town of Warrenton, VA I’m watching a mini-festival set up outside the coffee shop windows right now. I just walked outside and asked the small mob of very serious-looking 15 year old boys if it cost money to set up. They conspired quietly, knew nothing of the policies, ran off, got another slightly older boy who pointed me to an actual adult woman, who told me in an uptight small town way that of course it cost money to set up and I better not try anything squirrelly. (With the inflated police budgets in these tidy little places I believe her).
I paused, holding all the sweet talk on the tip of my tongue, rummaging through scenarios when I’d hide in an alleyway and clock a couple hours’ work before anyone caught me. Even now, I’m watching the canopy tents accordion outward, the street traffic thicken, all the money and energy and curiosity and TGIF escalating, and I’m itching all over. I know they’ve never seen this before. I know I’d make at least a hundred much needed dollars. Everything in my fingers and my chest and my feet is saying go, go, retrieve your belongings, get your gear out and look sexy before they can kick you out. This is what you’re made for, this is what you do, go, go, go.
But I walked back inside, I sat back down to type this, and I’ll be driving to Potomac in half an hour to make it to “Deep Zen Night.” I’ll meditate for 4 hours and talk to the Zen Master on Skype from South Korea. He will ask me if I have an answer to Master Yun-Men’s koan. Hopefully we’ll explode my symbolic delusions, enter the pure land of the tathagatha, and leave the vain concerns of the floating world behind. Or at least I’ll hear some kind words and have a few good hours of meditation. There’s more integrity in this plan, obviously, than the hotshot of good clean dope I’d get if I stayed here in Warrenton. Much more heart, much more honesty than if I lit their Main St. on fire, made their young women faint and their old women cry and their hecklers turn to fans and their fans turn to acolytes and... No! More heart, I tell myself. Wait, I tell myself. Zen.
No, no, I’m hopping back in Kimberly and driving this very moment. I will serve my sentence. I will come back like a maniac. I will make the minstrels weep. To that end, more purgatory for supper. Buddha Chinaski says, “Wait ten years. You’ll be stronger. Wait twenty years. You’ll be much stronger.”
Oh, I gotta run before I risk it all. Look at this hungry hub-bub. Look at these fat juicy antelopes. I’m leaving, I’m leaving, I’m leaving. I’m gonna come back stronger.

