About Michael Hetz by Michael Hetz

Blue collar Los Angeles kid, oldest of seven. Catholic School through college graduation, major sometimes history, sometimes English, always undecided. Now an atheist, or undecided. Though seems unlikely, at least as described by humans. Married for 55 years, best decision I ever made. If you met my wife you would agree it was a no-brainer.  Two grandchildren who call me Ganmpa Dude. Drove cab after graduation, had a low draft number, was drafted, refused induction, went to federal prison in Lompoc for grad school. Served four and a half months. Lots of drugs and a one-night escape to the woods with my wife, a blanket, some wine, and a small joint.

After painting houses for a couple years, got into advertising and design. Went from analog production art to partner in an ad agency to creative freelancer.

Always writing, always looking for the next shoulder to climb on and have a look at the better view.

Angry at being part of the 6th great extinction not knowing what to do about it, besides going extinct.

Rage, rage, raging against the dying of life.

Overcoming fears by publishing this attempt at being a poet, I so admire and am so loathe to identify as. But guess it’s just another meaningless title, and so yes in that case, a poet.

About Michael by Charles S.

To meet Michael, who sadly passed in 2024,  was an encounter with grace, charm, humor, and good will towards his fellow man. And almost everyone was Michael’s fellow man.

His puns were legendary, essentially, the mind of a Robin Williams, his synapses closing with electric speed on the funny solution within the ebb and flow of conversation.

But you won’t get much of that humor here. The cleverness remains, but here it’s tinged with a cynical vision that shows up in lines like “…hollowed out spirits pour through the liquor aisle…”. It also appears in many of his titles such as Prayer to Something, or Dead Elephant in the Room, or Indifferent Sand.

Yet the cynicism is powered by an abiding reverence for the living world. You’ll find moments of pure joy in our ‘mere’ existence in poems like Happy…

I have only this time
This moment
This breath
These heartbeats
And while they are alive
Let them be happy

Michael would write his poems in one session. He told me once that they were a blur of output without much conscious thought. The words weren’t contemplated long. There was no struggle. The stanzas just came into view, almost as if he was channeling his unconscious self into active, lively language. He would lose himself in creation. Having once deeply immersed my own self in the worlds of cognitive psychology and neuroscience for a decade, I informed him that this was the state of “flow,” where focus is maximum yet time passes with scant awareness. I felt he was a lucky man with the ease he could drop into that dreamy and productive disposition. Et voila, a poem would appear, and he didn’t quite remember writing it.

He sent me a few poems before publishing and I’d suggest editing the darkness because, I felt,  he needed to leave his readers a way out of the gloom. But I have some regrets about that advice. Perhaps he was merely seeing things more clearly than me and there really is no way to escape the approaching shadow. After all, the trend-lines for humanity are bleak in regard to the things that matter: pollution, climate, tipping points, resource use, political division, war, and the inescapable ancient imperatives of our primeval human nature. He was encouraged by renewable energy, had solar on his roof and drove an electric car.

But Michael was floored by the fact that so many Americans could vote into the highest office a character who remains to this day a conniving con man, pathological liar, narcissist extraordinaire (although he really is the best at that), and betrayer to his wife, the Constitution, and decency. That sort of thing made Michael’s head hurt and his big heart ache. His repugnance for the current political class of power-craving sycophants finds expression in, among others,  poems such as Hairspray Hoax and Hitler Was a Vegetarian.

The Permian, dear reader, is the geologic epoch that closed with the greatest mass extinction in the history of Planet Earth. The cause was unrelenting volcanic activity that lasted for tens of thousands of years at very large scale in what is now part of Russia — the Siberian Traps. The planet heated, habitats became unlivable on land, while the oceans became both too hot and too acidic for life. Michael knew in head and heart that humanity finds itself in the opening innings of a similar catastrophe, this time with no geological forces to blame — just ourselves, creatures who accidentally fell into massive amounts of energy and material wealth, and found themselves too busy consuming it to notice their one-time-only good fortune.

Not everything here is dark. In moments of amazement at the enlivening fact that the universe produced conscious creatures who’d gotten far in understanding it, Michael felt the awesomeness (and good luck) of our improbable existence. As one of the most clever and complex humans I’ll ever have the pleasure of knowing, I count my lucky stars to have called him friend for forty-five years. It was just too damn brief.

But, of course, Michael put it better. In It’s Only Me he said,

You can’t have everything
Really you can have nothing
There is no ownership
There is no thing to be owned
There is no owner
There is only this time we have
Together on this blue marble
There are no rules
Other than life’s demands
And the common sense
Of shared experience
Over eons that make this
Moment possible
Mansions with security fences
Are not secure
Possessions guarded
Are not possessed
Boundaries drawn in the dirt
Do not exist
This is the curse of the big brain
And the opposable thumb
A manifestation of
I, me, mine
A hallucination caused by
The chemicals in the meat sack
We carry between our shoulders
Separates me from it
There is only it
Which is my only me