THREE PROSE POEMS

JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ

The Human Tree I started growing tree branches out of my head and hair after my girlfriend broke up with me. She said I was a lost soul and a bad seed. I told her I’m talented just a bit disorganized. That’s when branches began to dangle from my forehead. Eventually, lush leaves bloomed from the brown branches. I was turning into a tree all right. I accepted it. After all, I was indifferent. A lost soul one could say. What did it matter if I had crossed over to plant life? I was alone. Perhaps a blue bird could live among my branches. So long as a woodpecker doesn’t destroy my bark, I’ll be fine. I’ll survive. I always have.

New Kid in Town I was on the subway when I saw a clown, a pirate, and a mermaid. Since I was new to the city, I tried to act casual. The clown was dressed like a bright rainbow; the pirate had his trusty parrot side kick, per usual; and the mermaid was majestic like the ocean. The funny thing is nothing happened. The clown got off Downtown in a hurry. Next, the pirate exited on Main St. and the mermaid must have gotten off after me. I tipped my Dodgers’ hat to her as I exited at the circus. I enjoyed my visit at the circus. I saw a man on a tricycle juggling a samurai sword. I saw a lion mimicking ballet. The move to the city was just what I needed.

Trapped I’m trapped inside of this prose poem. I can’t get out. The lack of line breaks is too liberating, it’s anarchy in here. Everyone is doing as they wish, feet up on the coffee table. I saw a man writing graffiti on the Governor’s mansion, the bravado. The wind is pleasant here. Pleasant like the ocean. I wanted to be a short story writer growing up; I settled for a puppeteer. I like the music in here, jazz and Spanish guitar. If you ask me, I don’t think prose poems should last too long. Eventually, you run out of gas, naturally, like a tattooed biker on the interstate. I’m trapped inside of this prose poem, but I don’t want to get out. It's nice and cozy in here. I’m invincible. the building block of all communication and culture, from the page, to the stage, to the screen. I am constantly trying to envision the literary arts community doing better at being seen, valued, respected, and supported by everyone in our society. I’m a founding member of PEN America’s Literary Action Coalition, and we’re working to earn that recognition from the government, investors, culture makers, consumers, and the population at large. Like I said, it’s not easy.

You might agree with what I’m saying, that there is a need here, an obvious niche to fill and bridge to build. But why me? Why me specifically? Am I really qualified for the job, never having taken a poetry course in my life, no framed BFA or MFA diplomas on my wall, no relative who just happens to be Marina Abromovic’s accountant? Well, listen to this: in public elementary school in Sacramento, CA, my fourth-grade teacher wrote “such a creative and smart girl, but she talks way too much and distracts the other students with her stories” while I wrote not one, not two, but three “Young Authors” books to submit to a district-wide writing competition. Whether I won the competition is a story for me to tell my therapist another day. If that childhood anecdote doesn’t strengthen my application for this peculiar role, maybe I don’t even want the job.

See, I’ve always known what my mission in life is, even as a little kid. My mission, my calling, is to help people connect in creative ways to build a better structure for society. Not just for connection’s sake: again, it is the means not the end. We need to connect more deeply and must actively reject the alienation and isolation that our society sells us, so we can reweave the fabric of our communities and patch together a more resilient, equitable and empathetic society, cutting out the ripped and rotten bits to heal and grow stronger. I have known my goal since my memory

of conscious thought. The problem was I didn’t know how to go about achieving it.

First I tried architecture, designing villages that would encourage human interactivity. Then I realized architects need to love math. Next I tried diplomacy, imagining that governments could speak to each other and somehow improve the day to day lives of their citizens. Then I moved to Washington, DC, and realized that only the wealthy and aristocratically connected can shape the policies that rule the world. Next I tried tourism, sure that individuals crossing national borders would share experiences that could bridge the gaps between them. Then I saw that only elites can afford to leave their countries. A brief stint as an executive at a social media start up helped me discover my love of The Deal, but the megalomania of homogenous tech founders was more than I could stand.

Then and only then, did I discover poetry. Not writing poetry for myself to get the rabid animals of my feelings out and capture them static on a page. Not writing poetry in hopes of being heard by thousands of adoring readers and fans. Writing “poetry as entrepreneurship,” as an antidote to alienation, isolation, fear, apathy, self-hatred, and the crushing weight of our banal, basic, and cruel existence. Poetry to pay my bills in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was lying to myself or others.

I’m doing it all Doing it all for the love And for the money

So now that you get the “why”—buckle up and let’s talk about “how.”

In November 2012, already disillusioned with grad school, I brought a typewriter and some performance artists to the opening of a Japanese restaurant on K Street in Washington, DC. Random, gray-suited people walked by and paused, intrigued, as we whipped up fresh poems like omelets, surrounded by mixed media art we’d hung on the walls to turn the place into a fully immersive art experience. It was totally unexpected, rich, and nourishing, and of course we focused especially on haiku. And I was blown away by how fun and easy it was for me to spin these tiny poems and hand them off to their recipients with no hesitation, doubt, or even editing. Yes, the typos abounded. But as I passed each tiny literary gift to the strangers before me, and their eyes lit up with surprise and delight, I was moved myself, and the customers flowed into the shop. It was like I’d opened a portal into a slightly different reality.

I knew there was something there. What I didn’t plan was a decade of entrepreneurship built around it. In July 2013, I moved to New York City to work for a now defunct bike tour company, immediately meeting two other typewriter haiku writers. (I decided the proper English term for this is haikuist by the way—I don’t own the name but I’m sure I coined it.) We started writing haiku on typewriters on the streets of Williamsburg, and in no time for Manhattan corporate clients as well.

big city - big goals bright lights shine and spotlights blind money flowed like wine

After three years of growing interest and profit margins at the game, in June 2016 I knew that it was time for me to quit my day job and become (the world’s first?) full-time, professional typewriter haikuist, and grow our group from three hipsters in New York to a network of twenty five poets coast to coast performing at events for all the top tech companies, artsy orgs, and funky philanthropists. It was a heady time: We were in a political crisis, but the economy was booming. I was managing all day-to-day operations of the growing company, but I also felt unheard by my business partners and started to realize that while our work was fulfilling my mission in some ways, we didn’t share the same values or goals.

we’re living the dream but something isn’t quite right i’m losing my voice

By the end of 2018 I hit an impasse with my two erstwhile collaborators, and knew I had to change something to get back on track with my mission. I didn’t set out to become a narcissistic rock and roll typewriter monkey, and I needed my work to directly correlate with my joy and an elevation of human consciousness. I launched my own company on my birthday, January 6, 2019, unleashing a year of retaliatory action and trauma that you’ll have to read my memoir to even begin to understand. (For now, let’s just say it involves a night in a Kings County Jail and learning a lot about something called “malicious prosecution.”) But against all odds, my new company thrived, and our capabilities and roster of talent grew and diversified. I put forth a clear new vision and stopped feeling ashamed of myself for taking credit for my hard work. I survived the most trying year of my life, and made a profit (and some enemies, duh) while doing so. And we weren’t just doing typewriter haiku at corporate events anymore (though we still love doing that and it still amazes people). We started working with ongoing clients making original content, creating campaigns, copywriting, teaching, curating spoken word performances and competitions, and I consulted on freelance biz dev and media projects using the skills I learned growing my own business.

It’s easy, I think: Success is enlightenment Words = Money = Power

By early 2020, I was racking up frequent flyer miles and collecting business cards and Instagram followers, growing our team, our income, and our recognition but low on sleep and starting to feel a little out of control. I was so desperate to prove that I could do it on my own, and surpass anything I’d ever done before, that I was obsessing over arbitrary success metrics yet again.

Never satisfied doing the same thing, I conjured up a new poetic entertainment experience: “Tell Your Secrets to the Moon.” I wanted to really dig into the intimate confessional element that is often felt when we write poems for strangers. They can divulge their darkest secrets, their wildest dreams, tell us about crushes . . . I have had people tell me things they have never uttered to another soul. We spent three days building a set piece in the shape of a Moon tarot card, cutting a tiny whole through which a silver gloved anonymous poet could pass poems. The poems, of course, were written inspired by each event attendee, and my team debuted the experience at the New York Public Library with Tinsel Design on February 20th with an audience of 1,000 friends and collaborators. To celebrate the positive response to the moon, we got ourselves toasted at the open bar, eventually stumbling jubilantly out of the marble monument way past midnight.

I spent February 25th to 27th in Amsterdam penning poems on demand at a European marketing analytics conference alongside a beloved Dutch calligraphy artist. That’s where I first heard of the strange flu that had prevented an Italian delegation from coming to the Amsterdam event. A knot of well-suited European men came over to get their poems, mostly dedications to their wives or passionate explanations about the power of their company’s varying software and told me the news about their missed Milanese colleagues—known to be the life of the party. I remember noting the information, but not sensing anything dire. There had been so many obscure virus flukes in recent years; they flared up, grabbed a news headline, then melted back into the primordial soup. It’s a flicker of a memory that now stands out as the match that would eventually light the forest fire of covid-consciousness in my tiny world. I had dinner that night as the guest of an award-winning, Korean-Dutch spoken word artist and DEI consultant at Ciel Bleu: a three Michelin star restaurant where a five course meal costs you about 5 hours and as many hundred euro notes. It was a pretty epic last meal, if I care to reflect dramatically on the moment.

After the conference, I flew back to sleep with my fiancé, The Wizard in our 450 sq ft apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn before hopping another flight to Houston to train a newly recruited poet and immediately bring her to write poems for a group of lawyers in a high rise downtown. I brought my favorite portable typewriter and an extra vintage writing machine for my new poet and invited her to meet me about three hours before our booked gig at a hotel bar around the corner from our client’s office. We had appetizers and cocktails in an enormous leather booth while I taught her how to use the typewriter and gave her sample prompts that she’d be likely to receive from recent law school graduates recently recruited to the firm:

Topic: summer vacation before I start my first real job as a lawyer

walking down the strand i stop to count grains of sand order, on the shore

We spent three hours side by side at a crisp white tableclothed station surrounded by young attorneys brimming with optimism, and the seasoned partners who would be mentoring them. I had been doing gigs like this since the end of 2012, but I never got tired of seeing the reactions of people realizing that I, the charming girl in the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel costume, was about to listen to them with rapt attention and create a one-of-a-kind verse for them on my antique typewriter. In the airy, glass-walled penthouse reception

area, thoughtful waiters diligently refilling our Texas whiskeys, a brand-new Ars Poetica poet by my side discovering the joy of writing poems for strangers with me, I felt like I was in heaven. We stayed late that night to write poems for every single waiter and staff person, some in English, some in Spanish. I know it’s not much, but I always try to make time to offer gig workers poems too – it takes me 90 seconds and can be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for someone who just spent 10 hours feeling invisible.

One red eye later, the next morning I was in Washington, DC, for a live podcast, before flinging myself onto the Amtrak back to Manhattan. I had a very stylish wedding, so I had to be show-ready within 90 minutes of arriving at Penn Station. On the train I called a random salon near the station and told them the situation and they said they could help me out. On my arrival they went straight to work, not only brushing and blowing me out, but offering a bang trim and makeup tips too. When I tried to pay, they refused. I was having a very lucky couple of days.

I took a cab to arrive in perfect albeit breathless timing, changing into my beaded lime chiffon gown (no one notices a frayed hem when the bodice is glittery) while The Wizard was decked out in his tailored tuxedo and ready to work the room at Flora Bar, MoMA’s ultra-chic restaurant. Between toasts and hors d’oeuvres and medieval stringed instruments and portraiture and poems, whispers wafted through the room about the sickness tingeing the periphery of our awareness like calligraphy ink. I dampened my ears, and kept typing, champagne refilling itself at my side while senators and stockbrokers smiled at their quirky little poems and asked me if I was secretly psychic. (I am, in some ways.)

After yet another wedding (this time for a more hipster set at Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel) on Sunday, and Carla Rozman, Man in the Road, paint on vintage magazine, 2016.

Rin Lee

a much-needed day of relative rest on Monday, I flew back to Texas yet again (I wish I was exaggerating) this time to San Antonio, where the decidedly un-hipster Marriott had invited me to stay to write poems for fellow conference goers at my first-ever AWP conference. As a bit of background: For years I had heard of this prestigious annual gathering of professors, famous writers, and various academics and smarter-than-thous, but I was a typewriter performance poet, a literary mercenary if you will. It was while I was blissfully, masklessly breathing recycled air somewhere over Appalachia that the covid tornado really started to spiral in this country, ironically enough a breakout having been discovered right at my destination. When I took my phone off of airplane mode to see the pre-conference chatter on Twitter, there was a flood of mass calls for the conference to shut down and pack up shop, to avoid becoming what we’d soon refer to as a “super spreader event.”

I took a Lyft to the hotel dumbfounded, my carryon bag jostling along the riverside cobblestones, and walked through the eerily empty hotel lobby, hand sanitizing stations planted at fifty-foot intervals in all directions. I kept scrolling, weighing the costs and benefits of leaving right away, pulled myself some tarot cards (including Death and The Tower) and decided to stay. I’d come this far, after finally shedding my imposter syndrome, I figured I may as well try my best to get what I could out of it, even if a number of prominent names had canceled.

When I got back to New York on the 9th, people were starting to fall apart a bit. Rumors were circulating that the governor’s daughter was warning Manhattan elites to evacuate the city. But on Tuesday night, March 10th, I had a booking for an event at the Whitney Museum, and the organizers decided not to cancel, so we showed up. Devin and Tania and I figured it like this: free booze, free art, and a chance to continue to grow the recognition for our new “Tell Your Secrets to the Moon” piece? We couldn’t resist. With about half the guests in attendance, and the waiters wearing sterile gloves, we heavily indulged in the open bar, wondering what the next day would look like.

On March 11th, New York City went into its first near-complete lockdown.

During those first weeks of March, as the COVID-19 pandemic really started to take over our global consciousness, all of our bookings for the next 6 weeks were canceled instantly, with good reason of course.

With a lot of time on my hands and a huge community of working artists, event producers, small businesses and more out of work, I searched for some small thing I could do to keep connections strong, surpass xenophobic and fearful responses, and also respect the science around staying physically distant to reduce the spread of the virus.

I started sending photos of poems to struggling colleagues, then thought that sick and quarantined people could really use poems too. I set up a webpage to take requests for those overwhelmed by fear, disquiet, panic, ennui. Volunteer poets (almost 50 of us!) then saw those requests and penned poems to address these individual concerns. One-on-one connection was back. My deepest hope was that by receiving a poem from one of our volunteer writers, we would create a web of compassion to soften the blow and make recovery in some way easier and quicker; maybe we would re-emerge into a more beautiful and empathetic world.

So we kept writing Poems for a world on pause Prayers typed in the dark

Did that happen? I’m not sure. But dozens of poets wrote almost 1000 poems that spring and summer. I’ve worked hard to invest my work in poetry with layers of meaning. Ars Poetica, the poetry organization I founded, has distinguished itself from a pack of live typewriter poetry events groups by being queer-woman owned with a truly diverse roster of writers extending across six countries, and planting a tree for every gigged client via our partner Arbor Day. Which brings me back to what I knew when I wrote my first haiku at age seven.

Poetry has value. And yet . . . . Typically, poets are assigned very little value, even those who emerge on the international stage. Why is this? Why is the work of a poet cheapened, haggled, stolen, puréed, and served back to us with a straw? I believe we need a new way of measuring worth and output, including detracting from your estimated worth if the majority of your activities are in fact harmful to the collective. Poetry as a rule harms no one. No thing. Poetry only helps, in its purest form, it intends to heal.

There is an intangible heritage of humanity, according to UNESCO, and it includes poetry. There is a universal component, and a personal one as well. My personal heritage is that of wit, creative problem solving, an obsessive desire to serve, enhanced by a ridiculous and clownlike personal demeanor that I have decided to celebrate as opposed to attempting to sterilize.

We are not living in the “great resignation” as the substack hoards would like to call it. It is not the end of good society, as lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, and my adopted home of Kentucky would prefer to declare in their stinky sweaty legislatures. Though, the biblical definition of apocalypse actually means “to reveal”—so they may actually have a point there—I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s not a panini or panorama or even a civil war. We are living in a portal.

This portal was long dormant, perhaps the last time it cracked open was between (or during) the world wars. Well, it has been activated again. Do you feel it? It is a shimmering hole in what we thought we knew, and we can ignore it, or stuff it up with glue and trash like a cracked windowpane in a sinking ship, or we can acknowledge it and leap on through. Break on through to the other side.

It’s not the matrix But you can still be Neo And it’s beautiful

There is just one issue we must address together: there are multiple groups vying for control of this portal, this transportive thesis. There is a small (exceedingly small, they cast shadow puppets of themselves on the white walls of our minds through gerrymandering and insipid media sycophants) contingent who represent ancient and putrescent power who cling to an outsize share of our attention, who continue to clumsily grapple at the quivering, innocent, nonpartisan portal, foaming at the mouth at the idea of catapulting us all through, bombs strapped to our heads like helmets. But they are only one group! There are many others, vying, each of them bad in their own ways, but at least different from the old way of being bad. I would be interested in seeing a new way of being, with its own original problems, not the ones that killed our grandparents and make our parents wonder if it would be better to kill themselves.

We keep paying our attention like we’re trained to pay our banking fees.

The banks should pay us for holding our lifeblood and getting to play with it and dirty it with their hands! We pay our attention and accept that our data is the price we pay for getting to watch ads for yoga pants on facebook.com. What? We give them everything we have ever thought or done in exchange for getting to tag ourselves in a drunk person’s photo. We let them track our every move so we can spend hours making videos of our deepest fears for them??? Why?

We could pay attention to something else—our own new path to entry in the jellyfish pathway that tore open sometime in late 2019 (be honest) This portal could make Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic look like a trip to the grocery store in comparison. Why not try a new route this time around—there is no ice left anyway, we could sail north to south. Certainly, if we sat down with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mackenzie Bezos, Bernie Sanders, and Greta Thunberg they would all agree that this world system is just . . . not it. So, what is a simple building block with which we could start to rebuild?

What comes next, comrades? Words are deeds so why not start writing poetry

I’m finishing the last few lines of this piece waiting for the Q70 select bus to pick me up from LaGuardia. Tomorrow is my first day at my new job, where I’ll be Global Creative Director at Noumena Partners, a radical new finance technology and social banking platform that, if all goes according to plan, could take back power from predatory lenders and data scrapers and put it into the hands of freelancers, artists, creators and solopreneurs like us. Poets and writers, able to pay their bills, buy homes, build new societies. If I do my job well, the systems that disempowered and exploited me might not be able to harm future generations. They deserve to find their own new problems to solve. And if I do a really good job, Ars Poetica will continue to be vital and profitable without my dayto-day management. Yes, you read that right: I’ve passed leadership and control of this dream to the poets that helped me build it: McPherson, Tallie, and Zoe. They’re already improving things I never could have done myself. I trust the poets to speak for themselves and keep writing toward a freedom far surpassing what I even originally dreamed.

Wonder is my work Revelry’s my KPI I invoice for joy ●