RIP to Poetry Month ‘26
Hello, guys, gals and nonbinary pals! Happy May Day! Seize the means of production and have a nice fancy root beer or something.
You may be wondering, "Seth, where did National Poetry Month go?" Folks, it has passed away. Rest in Peace to National Poetry Month, 2026. It is time to bid farewell.
I hope you all had a nice April filled with lots and lots of poetry or at least that you didn’t get a bunch of haul through your back windshield like I did. For that, and a few other reasons I won’t get into, April really has been the cruelest month, to be honest. T.S. Eliot redeemed once again. It sucks!
It hasn't been all bad though. My wife and I celebrated 9 years together and 2 years of marriage, and I am very grateful for that. I’ve been really lucky to teach some fun poetry workshops out in the community and meet lots of talented writers. I got my favorite tattoo yet a couple weeks ago. The Lakers are winning their playoff series (knock on wood). And, despite The Horrors, I have still written a poem every single day. I stopped writing to prompts because I have never particularly loved doing so. I thought writing my own ahead of time would help—it does with Snoopycember—but in writing stuff that is less specific and niche, they can make me feel a bit claustrophobic. But the poems happened anyway.
I’ve been freewheeling it the last couple weeks, and I am happy with a lot of what I ended up writing. A lot of edits needed still, and I have more generative work still to do for the manuscript I am working on, but of the 5 or 6 years that I have completed the poem-a-day challenge, this feels like the first time that a majority of them feel like complete poems. Not necessarily finished, but complete enough to stand where they are. It’s about time I figured out how to write these things!
I want to also bid farewell to Poetry Month with some meta talk. To be quite honest, I have probably thought more this April about why I write, whether I should, whether it sparks joy still, whether it’s worth navigating the weird ways in which the publishing world can feel gate-kept and exploitative, etc. etc. I don’t think there’s a life where I just stop writing poems--I gotta have something to do--but I’ve been thinking a lot about what their place out in The Void is, I suppose. And the answer is that they don’t really have one, I don’t think. I probably don‘t either, really. I’ve known all this for a long time but I didn’t know how to confront it. I still don’t, really. It’s not that I think my poems or my self are so singular and special that they don’t fit anywhere, they do; I do, ostensibly. It’s that the void doesn’t give a shit. And that is fine.
What I mean to say is that I don’t feel like I was meant to write poems. I was meant to exist, maybe, but the poems were never a given. I came to poetry at a young age as more of a coping mechanism than a hobby. There wasn’t room for sincere emotion, or for getting to know myself in patriarchal, stoic silence or in the loud, angry rooms I locked myself into. Poetry was, quite literally, the only social-emotional tool in my toolbelt I had for an embarrassingly long time. And then when teachers and professors and whoever said some of the poems were good, poetry became a way out of where I’d been. I clung to it through college and grad school because I was relatively good at it and not a whole lot else and so somehow that was how I was going to be able to reliably put a roof over my head and support my eBay habit. Now, poet isn’t a particularly high-earning career path now of days, and so you might be wondering why I thought that would work, but you gotta believe me: I am very dumb. Indirectly, though, it kind of did. I own An Roof in a lot of ways because I decided to go to school and write a bunch of poems.
All of this is to say, I have spent a lot of time ascribing meaning to too many things. I think I've found myself grieving the poems I might have written if I didn't feel like they had to justify, or redeem, struggle. What if, in this way at least, the joy I found in writing dumb little poems felt meaningless? What if the poems were meaningless. Because I think that's all I ever actually wanted, I think. To just write poems about how pretty the flowers are instead of postmortems of their wilted petals. Well, that and to own this Pepsi Phantom Menace promotional 1:1 Jar Jar Binks statue.
And so that is what I have decided to do. No, not buy the Jar Jar statue, unless you got a cool $2500 a can hold for a minute. Write poems that I want to write because I want to. Even the difficult poems that help me confront things I don't necessarily love confronting, I want to write them to learn from them, not because I need them to buy me anything. They can be as meaningless as they want to be. They can swim around the void unrestrained, out of place.
Anyway, here are some of the poems I wrote this month. Bye!
the clown studies their boutonniere
their first real one. they run their fingers along petals like silk
where the plastic used to sit. the eye of the daisy leaves pollen
on their hands. they gather as much of the yellow dust as they can
they paint their own polka dots. the pink flower rests the story
of its bloom on ridges too faint to see. the clown clenches their fist
and waits for seltzer water to blind them. instead, morning dew.
casey’s rewards
when i stop at the gas station by my house
to buy an energy drink or a pizza i always
tell them no, i don’t have a rewards account.
i do and im probably owed so many free
fountain drinks for my pointless fibs but its too
much i’d rather punish myself than keep track
of pennies off gallons of gas i throw a half dozen monster cans out of my truck and into the communal trash and i notice the different shades
of red brick where that suv crashed through
the building last year straight into the liquor aisle i used to lease out my liver to, back then
i used my casey’s rewards card i got my points
for every shot for every slurred hymn so at least
i got something for the nights lost. today i buy
3 gatorades for $6.50 and its a lackluster deal
but i need the electrolytes i don’t need the points they’re tainted i became the smell of gasoline and all i wanted was to speed things
up, the digital billboard the next lot over switches from some kids paid for ‘happy birthday’ to the power ball jackpot, the number
was too big for me to understand my hand
twitches as i spin my steering wheel i see
a man digging through trash for empty beer cans and just overhead the sparrows return
for the spring, their formation a dagger into
a sky as pink as the edge of my receipt,
colors produced by nearing absences i
do not need a reward for my gardettos
i don’t need to track consumption like i did
my lips taste like pixie sticks like the adhesive
on a misspelled bible verse bumper sticker. count all the footsteps i’ve regretted and
preserve them in mud on a convenience store floor
happy meal sonnet
i paint my face pale like ronald and spit
diced onions, single tear, salt burns my eyes
ketchup hands fumble cellophane i try
to tear loose my prize, my sacred plastic
furby, i collect freaks, juggle the myths
i create for them, they chirp lullabies
like bird songs. it’s all i hear. french fries
glisten like gold and the ketchup forgets
it’s not my blood. red and yellow cardboard
becomes a rorschach of grease, shaped like me
hiding in this minivan while the door
slams—10 pm, drive thru off I-80,
mom ignores my jokes. furbies eat screams, warn
me "there’s no consolation—try to sleep"
