Like Ben John Smith -7/05/2014

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talks about the love in his life

shit scared as if by speaking about it
someone'll come snatch
that feeling away from him

Ben John Smith 

is not a performer

you can't rehearse sincerity

and it's not a matter of half measures

pausing a little bit pregnant

hurts when he reads his poetry

out to you, has to force the words
from off his unrolled shaky pages

a clenched fist self incriminating
pitiful confession
of what would've otherwise been

a perfect crime

we never would have caught you 

Ben
no one ever would have noticed
y'woulda gotten away with it

and I don't know

if it's that you don't like yourself

sincerely

or you just don't like

your own sincerity

if I knew

how to make
having a sit-down cigarette
next to a dead animal
something beautiful
or just good
I would

steal this from you

and run

and I would never give it back

you give away your work

none of it calculated or deliberate

it's not trying to get laid
or preach a lesson on
reaching twenty-million
trauma-porn prophet
not  white-knight Goddess
so much cookie-cutter
rhetoric candy-coating
safely aping others style

not polishing up your act
bitching about the musical chairs
and first placing-prizes
in a world the size of Monday night
at a bar, late

you make me remember
back to a bad-sex time
when poetry would hurt
when y'would make yourself...

Ben John Smith
a self made man

we listen to you flagellate lies

out of us all altogether

a super aggregate
sacrificial Jesus fuck guilt magnet

I wish speaking didn't hurt you so much

wish your writing would lie sometimes

I know you can't make it

no word of a lie

I have bad dreams

subconsciously threatened by
visits from other professional poets
more apparently career successful
than my workaday self
most of them are nice to me
in my dreams

unlike all of them

Ben avoided scoring out of ten
dosent spell so good
hugs as though he means it
and never gives me nightmares

tell you I would rather

try fucking someone

without using my hands

than write open honesty

if these wall could talk

I would paint over them

I don't want to be Ben John Smith

I'm not sure sometimes

that he does either, but

and I'm not alone here

I am very grateful

that he is.

___________________________

Check out Ben's work at:

http://www.horrorsleazetrash.com/

-Peace

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