Reviews

“Cleaning the Gutters of Hell” Reviews:

“Tohm Bakelas, Cleaning the Gutters of Hell, introduction by James Norman, Zeitgeist Press, www.zeitgeist-press.com, 2023, 120 pages $13

Zeitgeist Press boldly asserts that they publish poetry that anyone could read, which is an admirable goal that more poetry publishers should aspire to. Bakelas is, in these poems, a kind of ordinary guy with an extraordinary job; he is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital.  What that means in everyday life, I can only imagine, having spent a good deal of a couple of years spending weekends visiting a parent at one of those places. Luckily, Bakelas has the kind of insight, and clarity of purpose to make life there as vivid as it sounds. I only wish there more of the insightful, hair raising, pieces, rather than: what I do on my days off. Not that there isn’t much to appreciate outside the nuthouse walls; I expect you’d drink a lot, have bad relationships, get divorced a couple of times too, if you spent all of your working hours in places that have suicide rooms, lockdowns, and padded wall places. In fact, it is extraordinary that Bakelas is as prolific as he apparently is, given the collections he has published at a relatively young (in his 30’s) age.

Bakelas quotes William Wantling, no stranger to madness and excessive behavior but a brilliant writer, in his epigraph,

“What I wonder is, why all the hassle?
Why all the bullshit?
I never wanted to be a poet anyway
I’d carry a lunchbox like everybody else
If only the muttering would stop.”

Section titles give you some idea of what we are dealing with here:

Part One: Smoking Near the Loading Docks of Heaven
Part Two: Hell, That Revolving Door with No Exit
Part Three: Purgatory Is a Parking Lot in New Jersey

That Bakelas managed to maintain, granted  maintaining is on a razor thin edge of a blade of substance abuse, depression, madness… is kind of a miracle. He’s awfully young to feel so old. The poems speak for themselves. Writing is not the cure but the life blood.”

            – Alan Catlin, Misfitmagazine.net, Issue 37, Winter 2024.

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Luminescent Messenger, a Review of Tohm Bakelas’ “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell,” by Pete Mladinic

In the third, final section of this book appear the lines “one lone firefly flickers on,/ a luminescent messenger/ of hobo lullabies.” If that messenger were human, in a long coat scuttle across an avenue, the message, on a piece of paper in one pocket might be one word: resilience.

These poems invite reads to revel in the pleasure of reading, and also to remember, and to be, and in being “in the moment,” to hope for moments to come. Tohm Bakelas speaks of himself, for himself and his readers, for all of us, for humanity, in poems that are as public as they are private.

A reader reads a poem and thinks: that’s memorable, or that’s neat, I want to do it too. Bakelas’ poems have that effect. A reader would be hard-pressed to tell how much time and effort went into the writing of any one poem, because they are all well written and suggest resilience. One concludes with a chant-like “stay within the light,” and another, “pushing forward against it all.”

It, not only the changing present but also the unchangeable past, several times manifests itself in graveyards. Headstones are things of substance, parts of the whole where mortals remember the past and breathe the air of a sunny day or a dark night. The poet remembers dead parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, a dead marriage, as he drives down a street, moving forward. In “bruised tongues,” nothing goes with everything. Elsewhere, forgetting goes with remembering. “Memories fade like book pages.” And in “exiting the sun” “memories remain in place.”

The less fortunate, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, struggle to remember, or can’t remember.

Bakelas, a social worker in a psychiatric hospital, knows firsthand the less fortunate, as well as the fortunate. His poems strongly suggest the good luck of being alive. To change the cat litter, to play hide n’ seek with his children, to sip from a bottle slid in front of him by a bartender’s hand, to hold his lover’s face, to look in her eyes and be held in her arms are things he celebrates. Even a hangover, and eating microwaved waffles over a sink, and seeing deer on a lawn at 2 AM, are described in ways that reveal the extraordinary of nights and days.

And of days to come? The future is an extension of the present until what was, what is, and what will be cease to be. Where would we be without hope? A person hopes it rains tomorrow, or that it doesn’t rain. The poems suggest hope and future are synonyms. In the middle of “i hope it doesn’t rain,” that person says “but any day/ spent together/ side by side/ softens the sun/ and slows down time,” in “2/27/21” talks of “lives moving forward,” and in “dinner visitation” “…with clenched teeth i start/ the car, fully aware of/ what lies ahead.”

Suicide is a recurrent word. What to say about that? This poet uses strong language. He doesn’t mince words. The person in the poems, if you ask, How are you? and he’s having a shitty day, he’s going to tell you. Also, he’s going to tell you again and again, what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what it means to get kicked in the teeth by life, and come back. He’s going up tell you in eloquent lines, in memorable poems. “there is a certain sadness in a fallen button/ resting upon the fifth step in a psychiatric/ hospital stairwell.” Get this book, read this book, you’ll be glad you did.

One of its best poems, and there are many best poems, is “life reflex.” This is an amazing poem. In the cannon of contemporary poetry, it doesn’t get any better than this.

The word that reaches out and grabs this reader by the throat is: smile.

            – Pete Mladinic, CHEWERS // MASTICADORES, November 27, 2023.

     There’s still a few people left out there who prefer reading to the moronic jabber of television. After a long day of soul-killing work, the frivolity of Dancing With the Stars or the stupefying boredom of Downton Abbey just doesn’t do it for them. These are the types of people who sit in little rented rooms alone (to them other people are every bit as annoying and moronic as television shows so they become recluses) shutting the world out and retreating with a bottle of whiskey and a good book of poetry. Problem is that the “Meat Poets” are dead and gone now leaving very little left to read. If you’ve been through all your volumes of Richmond, Wantling, and Bukowski you are left high and dry. Until now. Tohm Bakelas to the rescue.

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     Cleaning the Gutters of Hell is the latest collection of poetry from Tohm Bakelas. The publisher’s foreword reveals the interesting story behind the publishing of this book. James Norman, (publisher at Zeitgeist Press), had been after Bakelas for a long time to collect his poems into a full-length book. Bakelas kept putting him off and then one night Norman called him on the phone and said, “”Listen bud, you keep doing these books with other people. I think it’s time we did a book, ya know? You’re good bud, it’s time.” They kept up the phone conversations, but the poet had no idea where to start with a new book saying, “I don’t know what the fuck you want!”

     Norman told Bakelas he’d figure it out. And he did. Cleaning the Gutters of Hell is the result.

     By the time you get to the second poem of the collection you know what you’re in for. It’s titled “cum stains and cat litter” and the ambiance is set. (Bakelas almost never uses capital letters.) In the poem “blessing,” god tells Bakelas to enjoy his afternoon, that he deserves it, and Bakelas goes home to drink a bottle of Mexican beer. God, by the way, was one of the patients in the psych ward where

     Bakelas works as a social worker. As you can probably guess, the psych ward makes for some pretty interesting poems. To wit:

          a plastic food tray

          fashioned into a knife

          is not good in the hands

          of a patient adjudicated

          not guilty by reason of insanity

          on a murder charge

          Cops were summoned, pepper spray was deployed, and Bakelas made it to lunch on time.

     Bakelas writes poetry “for the same reason/ i go to bars, because i am lonely.” Like most lonely people he doesn’t have much time for humor and there isn’t a lot of it in this book. This book, much like life, is pretty fucking bleak. If you’ve ever been fed up with jobs or relationships or just people and the world in general, Cleaning the Gutters of Hell is your new drinking buddy—somebody who knows exactly how you feel. None of this “look on the bright side of life” malarkey. Most of us know there is no bright side. In other words, there’s no bullshit here. Here’s Bakelas in the bar near last call:

           & then she’s gone

          & the bar closes soon

          & the moon is 2/3 full

          & i continue to drink on

          as if drinking more could

          possibly bring her back

     Everyone who’s ever sat on a barstool trying to work up the courage to go say hi to the hottie at the end of the bar can relate to that one.

     Bakelas describes with poetic detail his drinking, his benders, his loneliness. Of course with benders come hangovers: “and in rolling over/ to escape the sun,/ the bed balanced the body/ as the mind tried/ balancing the hangover/ and the world.” He’s made a few trips to detox/rehab and has this to say about it: “for as many times as i’ve read/ the serenity prayer,/ it never changed/ a fucking thing.” And he’s a keen observer of other drunks, noting the crowd out front of the Shoprite in his neighborhood: “they drink their coors light tallboys/ and smoke their cigarettes while/ sitting on benches covered in/ advertisements and sparrow shit.”

     Bakelas writes of an old man living alone, “he had no radio/ no tv, no microwave/ just stacks and stacks of paper.” The old man was a trash picker and hoarder—he even cut obituaries out of the newspapers and hung them on his curtains, believing he knew them and they had forgotten to say goodbye.

          when they found him

          buried beneath his life’s work,

          stuffed inside his mouth was

          a crumpled piece of newspaper

          containing two words

          written in black marker:

          remember me

            – Hugh Blanton, Dear Booze, February 29, 2024.