Vampires, Buddhas, & Karl Marx

So apparently I love Michelob Light. Yup. I’ve homebrewed, handpicked, and sampled just about every beer available to me and, at last, I’ve found my long, lost forgotten son: A wee lad named Michelob Light.

Last night I sat down with my boy and watched the light change on the walls of our little apartment. I also read the latest Rolling Stone, the latest Oxford American, and a book on power called Power. Janelle made polenta and we feasted on that. Afterwards, I went on a bike ride downtown, returning with mango ice cream and cookies for the household. The light in the skies downtown was even prettier than the light on our walls. The sky was all lit up in a soft, smoky little sunset that might’ve looked a little lonely up there, but was fine besides.

This morning I failed in my attempt to get to Dey House, which is where the Writer’s Workshop headquarters are located. I’ve been meaning to go over and introduce myself, but it’s not as easy as you’d think. These days, there’s a lot of minutiae to tend to. Like all this financial aid stuff that makes my brain hurt just to sit and think about. And becoming a resident. And red tape. And then the budgetary concerns. I find myself drawing cartoons lately of a certain winged vampire Buddha who descends to spirit my psyche away from all the wolves of minutiae. But that’s just cartoons. In real life, I gotta be my own vampire Buddha…

I once wrote a poem called “The Vampires versus The Buddhas” and submitted it to a journal called Figdust, which a certain local professor/poet was publishing (and by that I mean that he was fronting the money and guidance for the project, which was in truth the pet project of a certain comely co-ed with whom I once took a poetry class). Anyway, “The Vampires versus The Buddhas” didn’t get selected for publication. But two other poems of mine did. And one day, in the late 1990’s, I was standing on top of a half-built, never-finished geodesic wasp’s nest of a home in the Blood of Christ Mountains in southern Colorado, opening up a letter from home. And inside it was a copy of the journal, with my poems and a note from the co-ed thanking me for my contributions. It was a weird moment. It was like standing on a kitchen table on the moon and receiving a letter from Karl Marx.