Poetry By Jeff Finlin

Mike Fritcher CC




Addicts bent 

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There is no romance in writing..it's like cleaning a toilet bowl..everyday....over and over..with a dirty brush...wiping it clean with your tongue
 
Behind the dance of writing... there is the romance of it cloaked in the corner... that bounces in the distance off of roads uncharted.... there is a lifestyle of thought, literature and characters stalking the cobbled streets of far off towns ...caped and cloaked in boudoirs....a loveless state of longing for words that pull us past whats real and hangs you out to dry.....into a confusion unseen..creeping there..as the addicts bent... 

"They got this down to a science." she said..."you are the mouse...it, the trap. The problem is the trap is invisible..it waits, baited in your mind...the work we do is so we can see it in the corners....spring loaded and waiting to snap" 

I forget, that's the problem 
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But i hit some real greazy shit today ..a real slippery slope on the edge of nowhere Montana..in the battered loam of nothingness here strung out across the prairie...in Butte...what am i doing here?...stalking the writers house...standing at Kerouac's grave in my head, reading Mexico City Blues on social media...driving into the abyss...it scared me by reminding me how i get sucked into this romance ..enamored...until I’m unclaimed...until it turns into this kind of toxic dance and i start to lose, very subtly the ability see the true from the false...and it slowly becomes the core disfunction...the bad feeling in your gut ...the obsession with the adjective instead of the noun...the flair instead of the craft.....the lust and not the love.... the dreaming instead of the seeing.......the me and not you....the story and not the life...the myth and not the man...then the lights blink...the crossing bars come down on your connection.....you find yourself gone....like the famous writer... hopeless....a useless drunk...dying in his own legend...staring holes through his good for nothing...



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​Jeff Finlin is an American artist, songwriter, author and yogi. He has released 15 critically acclaimed albums around the world, authored three poetry books and two books on yoga and recovery. He is currently living and working in Colorado.