#548: Why I Am Not A Carpenter

It is not the poem I wanted to write today, but the prompt at NaPoWriMo was irresistible.

Why I Am Not A Carpenter

–after Frank O’Hara

I am not a carpenter, I am a poet
and a musician and a teacher. Why?
I think I would rather
be a carpenter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, I’ve mostly hit my thumb
with a hammer, and outside of 7th grade
wood shop class, where I built a kind of
desktop book shelf, one short board and
another two smaller boards glued into slots
of some sort to make a slanted place
to store about ten novels, I have built
nothing else since, save for a few swelling
thumbs and a shitty fence and a wall
in a basement with dented sheetrock
and a sloppy job with tape and mud.
My brother, a devout Christian, is a carpenter,
like Jesus. He built a tiny house for his daughter
for nothing but materials and time,
while I paid a guy nearly half of my retirement
savings and then some for a tiny house
and what amounted to a robbery.
I paid a guy to rob me in order
to protect my thumbs.
Thank the gods I can play the drums.

I chose words and rhythm,
can carry a tune, and for 32 years
I talked to young people about
words they could use and books
they could read. We built the ineffable.
And in a song I called “Fungible,”
there’s no mention of money,
and in another song called
“The New Big Thing,” the new big
thing is never identified. Carpentry
is always about meeting some expectation,
whereas, the things I do are not. For instance,
I thought about the word “Sardines”
as the title of our next album.