POETRY

*This page is currently under maintenance. Check back soon for bad poetry by me.

Poetry, I’m sorry, bad poetry, is essential to life. “Bad” art (sometimes, lots and lots of bad art) prefaces good art. And good art connects us. It grounds us. It defines humanity. Would life be worth living without movies, or music, or painting, or poetry? Let me backtrack. If you’re 55 and you’re a twice-divorced workaholic who manages finance, maybe you would argue that you could be content in a world without those things.

But you see, the world around you depends on poetry. We’ve all seen Dead Poets Society, right? Or at the very least scrolled past this meme on VSCO (pictured, right)

I’ll never claim to be a good poet. But, when I was nineteen, I took a poetry workshop class at Rutgers University under one of my idols J.T. Barbarese, and I wrote poetry about some of the things that had happened in my life that were worth writing poetry over: losing my dad at 17, watching people in my world succumb to addiction, growing up in my hometown with my best friends. Here you’ll find some of those poems, and some I’ve written since then…drunk in bar bathrooms or crying in parking lots or in the waiting room of a tattoo parlor.