Thursday, December 3, 2009

Untitled

I was sitting in the front room at Alex’s today, happier
Than I’ve been in a long time with the sun
Creeping in through four windows
And high ceilings and a guitar
In a chair and an oriental throw rug
On the bare floor
Billie Holiday was, and I was. . .
Sitting on the sofa reading and waiting for
Alex to get out of the shower.
A deaf and semi-insane but
Well-meaning man was
In the kitchen
Clanking, Crashing dishes and
Shuffling sandy across the floor.

Goodbye in a Minor Chord

A satyr minus horns,
A rose without her thorns,
A poor man’s son,
The obvious one,
Homogenized and hung.
The dog-woman grunts,
“Ambivalent cunts,
La Loba will heal,
Whomever you steal.
To justify mythos,
To murder the cantos,
Of surrogate dreams,
Of ant-ridden beams.”
I could tell you a story,
A tale made of teeth.
A yarn that unravels,
Like a drunk Christmas wreath,
Of bitter psychosis,
That stalks like a cat,
Of feeling ridiculous,
Stupid and fat.
But if you know a bank,
Where the wild thyme grows,
Then I want you to do it.
I want you to go.

Poet's Creed

I will not make pants or pomp or politics priority
I will kiss dance in a trance or midmorning and make love
Like a goddamned rocket taking off for nowhere.
I will pin my muse someday in the center of the ring
Just to tickle her between her legs with a feather
And laugh, rakishly running my hands through my hair.
These things I swear.
These things I swear, by the eerie glow of infomercials
Flickering in the 2:00 A.M. through the haze of my drunkenness.
These things I swear.
Because I dare to swear.
I will find time to throw fruit at government buildings,
Find windows to look through
And stare
For hours.
Because I dare to swear,
By the ashes of Neal, Jack, and Allen,
And all things holy and un,
That I will care,
For dogs and pot and pornography
More than the president.
These things I swear,
By my own wild hair,
And by my bleeding fucking heart.

On Being Fluent in Iambic Pentameter

To speak the tongue of sages comes in handy,
Addressing cars and couches full of kings,
It keeps one’s grave reproaches sounding dandy,
Makes one who’d scream seem more like those who sing.

But commoners ignore a merry measure,
Are quick to point their fingers at the poet,
Who’d exploit their many miseries for pleasure,
And be fool enough to think they wouldn’t know it.

A rhythmic poem’s a thing that’s rarely risky,
For flawless beats a meaning does disdain.
The beauty of the awful shock of whiskey,
Will override the beating of the rain.

Take wit to heart and meter to the head,
A poem is done that’s said what should be said.

The Poet's Wife

I have music rotting inside of me
Things I’ve never said eating holes in my teeth.
Truth not expressed turned inward to become
Something worse than a lie.

Someday you’ll be waiting for me
And you’ll look past your nose onto an empty horizon.
I imagine that you’ll miss another face to talk into.

But you will have lost me,
And art to last ages crouching towards becoming.

Pool Party

He’d slipped her the note in study hall. He sat in the row behind her. “Party Saturday night at my house,” it had said, “wear your bathing suit.” Her face got hotter as she read it. She could feel the hair on her legs bristle against the insides of her pant legs as she stared at the awkward curves of his penmanship. A secret, thrilling vibration rose up off of his writing. A boy’s writing. It was meant for her.

Patty slipped the note into her purse and it burned there, an ember of confidence, throughout the rest of the day. She almost felt her classmates might see the glow coming through the leather. A boy’s writing.

In the girl’s restroom she considered her reflection. Her full face, slight mustache, heavy brows. Here was a face that could be loved. A face that promised more than the sum of its parts, apparently. Wear your bathing suit. Her hands fell to smooth her jeans down the sides of her thighs and she was not in the least perturbed by their relative width. Not everyone is born thin, long, smooth like the ones who usually got invited to parties, passed notes. Girls like her were starting to come into fashion now. She turned her head slightly to the right and lowered the lids of her eyes. “Thank you for inviting me,” she whispered, “you have a lovely house.”

“Thank you,” she closed her locker.

“Thank you,” she walked out the doors of her high school squinting at the sunlight. Early June. Groups of girls huddled together in the parking lot smoking cigarettes. One girl was riding a boys back, laughing. “Thank you so much for inviting me.”

“Your house is lovely,” her bus was waiting at the back of the line.

“It’s such a lovely house,” her seat was waiting at the end of the aisle.

She looked at the window, at the houses moving by. Light blue, white, pale yellow, light blue, pale yellow. The colors of the houses were nothing. Party. Saturday. Night.

This was Thursday afternoon. The sun bathed her front lawn with possibility, with the warm energy of countless possible scenarios. She looked down at her wide feet, sweating on cheap flip-flops. These were the flip-flops of a person with a Saturday night. A Saturday night at my house. These were the flip-flops of a person who has been told to wear her bathing suit. She listened gleefully to the soles slapping up the steps. Par. Ty. Par. Ty. Par. Ty.

Glancing around her bedroom she was touched by the cheeriness of objects, though she lacked the capacity to name the things she saw. A shining thing here, a frilly thing here. There was only room for bathing suit. It was the only noun that registered now. Bathing suit blazed in her mind’s eye. Its carnival colored lycra hung there at the center of her thoughts, dripping chlorinated water.

It was Chinese takeout for dinner. Her fortune cookie said, “Your deepest desire reveals your nature.” She stifled a squeal. Later the in the steam of the bathroom mirror she remembered. Her true nature stared back at her. . .a swimmer at a party, mingling with boys, opening her eyes underwater, swimming between legs, brushing up against other wet bodies. The party made her delicious to herself. She blew a kiss at her reflection.

That night her father turned the bedroom knob and more darkness spilled in through the crack in the door. She clenched her eyes and her inhaling and exhaling became a rapid, whispered prayer: partysaturdaynightatmyhousebringyourbathingsuit, partysaturdaynightatmyhousebringyourbathingsuit.

O The Day. O the Hallowed Day it came. O how the essence of Saturday struck her when first she opened her eyes. Gazing downwards her stomach appeared flatter than before.
Shaving her legs was a holy rite. She tapped the razor against the shower wall with an invocation, “Saturday night.”

She was standing on the front walk now. The party lie just beyond the house, she need only walk through. She felt a stifling heat in her groin that rose up to her jaw line as she stared at the front door. Time had slowed and the honey of June was oozing out of the atmosphere, out of the flowers. The door swung open.

“Oh! You’re here!” It was a male voice. She extended her hand, lowered the lids of her eyes.
Behind her she heard, “Here we are!” And two taller girls brushed past her into the womb of the house.

She trailed behind them, entranced. Through the sliding glass doors she could see the sunlight glinting off the pool. The surface of the water shone like a beacon.

She moved toward it as no one watched. She removed the t-shirt she had so carefully chosen hours before, kicked off a new pair of flip-flops, shimmied out of cut-off shorts.

She stepped off the side of the pool. An enormous splash. Many pairs of eyes on the water at the place she’d gone under.

One girl near the potato chips muttered, “cow.”

Under the water all was silence as she reveled alone in Saturday night. Opening her eyes she saw the long white legs of others. She let the air out of her lungs in a long bubbling sigh and rose to the surface. Awkwardly she climbed up out of the luminous blue rectangle.

As reality closed back in around her, she started to dry off in the heat of the night. Carefully dressing again, she walked back out through the front door of the house with a wet bottom.

Back in bed she stared in wonderment at the ceiling. The best party ever.

Big Joe’s Post-Modernist, Cubist, Existentialist, Summer Camp for Girls

(Their faces are lit eerily from the underside, they sit around the campfire, riveted, as one girl speaks.)
“Comrades!
I have seen the perfect woman!
I have seen her hand grazing packages of frozen food in the market.

I did not dare to meet her eyes.

She is out there somewhere. Truly.
Maybe close!
(Some girls wince.)

I have seen her profile.
I was sitting in my father’s car on the passenger’s side.
We were stopped at a red light.
And she was behind the wheel of the car to our right.
She did not seem to notice me as I stared and stared,
Nearly burning a hole in her exquisite cheek.

I turned away the moment she swiveled her head around!
(One girl cries out.)

Thank heaven she did not see me.

Before that too
I had heard her following me home from school.
Her heels clicking on the pavement.
I knew it was she. I can’t tell you how, exactly,
But I was sure. Positive in fact.
(Another girl inhales sharply.)

Let us not be angry with her, friends, she is an innocent creature,
A Frankenstein.
Her very existence proves our own.
Allows us our fiercely defended flaws.

Even still, as I am sure you realize,
She will not hesitate to destroy any one of us.

I only hope that now that you, my sisters,
Have witnessed my own testimony,
My own personal experience,
Of the Beast’s searing presence,
And terrible beauty,
That we will be able to stop,
Suspecting one another,
Of being the Hated One.
(One girl sheds a tear.)


Sisters! Gentlewomen!
You will recognize her as I have…
Only remember, she is much too clever
To reveal her true identity,
In the company of other women.
(The girls’ suspicious eyes dart from face to face.)

T.S. Eliot

If T.S. Eliot was a rabid dog,
Running along the fence on a street in my neighborhood,
I would most probably avoid that street,
I would seek out alternative routes.
I see you now, dog.
Mangled morphemes dripping from your gleaming incisors,
Snorting out obscure epithets,
Shitting impossible symbolism all over the grass!
How I detest you!
I will let you loose in Ezra Pound’s backyard.

To Love

Sir Love, your language is dead.
To Dante even, Latin sounded arcane.
No longer lofty,
Nearly dumb,
You sit with a wad of chewing gum
As big as a fist
Pressed into your cheek.
Fumbling with English adjectives,
Forever,
Never,
Is what you meant to say.
These are our clumsy absolutes,
These are all we have to offer.

Woman

Woman

Keep bleeding,
Stop needing,
What you want,
And want, instead,
The things you need.

Stop crying,
Keep lying to yourself,
And alone in the dark,
Let the truth slip by silently and undetected
By any radar.

There is no room for emptiness
In your head anymore
No room to slide around
The hundreds of chairs in your heart
They sit there, rigid
Locked in, end to end, tense and crowded,
So let them be.

Learn by rote their order and number,
Assign them colors and feelings to help you remember
Who used to occupy their seats.
Forget the names themselves,
They will only confuse you.

Burn away the excess fat
Of old terrors and madness
With the slow fires of exactitude.
Let the chaff of past dreams
Fall back into the earth that they may be renewed.

Do not harden into bitterness,
And yet take care lest your tenderness paralyze you.

Learn not to chase and beg,
But wait silently to be chosen and collected,
For your particular glory,
And thus grow to become a woman.

Burroughs

I saw you from behind, rounding a corner in Mexico City. Trailing a cherubic boy, you were desperate, downtrodden, nearly devoid of flesh.
Many days I waited in the same place, until you came again and I cornered you and begged you breathlessly for your presence at my table.
As you eyed me suspiciously from under the brim of your hat, stroking your wizened chin with sharp, deft fingers.
I clutched your coat and drug you to a filthy cantina.
Sat across from you for hours.
Stared at you. Took off my shoe. Rubbed my foot between your legs.
You sneered and kicked it away. You refused all offers of alcohol.
I prodded you. Poked you with questions.
With insane praises of your emaciated frame.
You asked me what my game was.
You asked me if I was on the nod.
You kept calling me Jack.
You asked me what day it was.
A cat wandered into the cantina and leapt into your lap.
You stroked its fur the opposite way.
It clawed its way up onto your shoulder and stared at me from there.
Two sets of feline eyes gorged into my head.
I started to sweat.
I reached across the table as though I were dreaming
And put my finger into the hollow of your cheek.
You grabbed me by the wrist and smiled.
I tilted my head back in ecstasy and sighed at the ceiling.
(The cat dug its claws into your shoulder.)
You screamed and gripped my wrist harder.
I shuffled my feet.
You rubbed the back of your neck.
I whimpered.
You exhaled.
I flushed.
You moved your mouth.
I did not hear a word.
The ceiling was white with one black speck.
The ceiling was white with one black speck.
One black speck.

Then we were in glaring white sunlight,
You and I.
You were pointing over my right shoulder.
I spun around.
“There,” you were shouting,
“There.”
I shielded my eyes from the sun.
I was looking into the flashing spectacles of another man.
“He’s got what you need,” you told me, smiling.
The thin brown man took my hand.

“No!” I screamed, “No, he hasn’t got what I need.”
“Junk,” you said resignedly and started to walk away.
The man was dragging me in the opposite direction. Oh. God.
I screamed your name and you ignored me.
I screamed again and you shook you head.
I twisted my wrist away from the other man and ran to you
As fast as I could.
Ran right up to you and fell on my knees,
“Oh, Burroughs, please, it’s you, oh please.”

“You can not seduce me out of my fix, lady, believe me.”

“It’s not the drugs I want.
It’s you Burroughs, let me in there,
Ol’ Crusty Face, Ol’ Stern-Faced Granddaddy of a whole
Heavenly host of lesser writers.
Of the rest of them there bullshitting, bead wearing beats
Back in gray New York and the others
Tripping face laughing zen men out in orange California mountains.
You Burroughs, you are the legend of legends.
You who walk among the dead like Orpheus.
You who left something dear with them there on the other side,
That you know you can always go back and pick up,
As long as you’ve got a few pasetas in your pants.”

You lit a cigarette and tossed me one.
(It looked like half of it had already been smoked, but no matter.)
You put your arm around my shoulders and we walked together
Through Mexican streets alive with mysteries and demons.
My senses were wide awake.
My mind, lucid and full.

“Where are we going, Burroughs?” I asked.
“Back to my place,” you said.

We sat in your barely furnished apartment.
A few books, a few records, a few chairs.
Pillows on the floor.
I sat.
“Burroughs,” I said, “I am asking you to do your part, as you are. It wasn’t junk that brought you to Mexico from the Midwest. You are trying to out run death, but you will go back to the tomb of St. Louis to die despite your best efforts to avoid your fate. Still, Burroughs, your fortune is great and important. The legacy of your strength as a human transcends all roach infested rooms with underage boys offering you their bodies. It transcends the sickness. It transcends the pain of the cure. It transcends all images of lonely, depraved men butchering their arms with pins and needles and going cold and blue in rooms with no friends, nay, not even the friendliness of furniture or portraits on walls. Terrible.”
You shifted where you sat on the floor.
“Does this mean the madness will subside?” you asked.
“It only gets worse from here on in,” I told you.
I put my cigarette out.

Meekly, you touched my breast.
I stared into your eyes. You smiled. I touched your knee. You shivered. I put my fingers through what was left of your hair.
A cat came in through the door of the room chasing a bug.
You tensed. I gripped your thigh.
The roach scuttled across the floor.
The cat got bored, came to rest behind you and you put your hand on her back.
“Look at me, Burroughs,” I commanded,
“I have seen the worst and the best things you’ve done. Do not be afraid.”
You met my gaze with guilty eyes.
The cat padded over to me to rest its head in my lap.
You closed your eyes.
You wept and took me by the shoulders.
You shook and wept deep heaving sobs.
I looked at the top of your head and was still.
You locked me in a fitful embrace and drew back again to look at my face.
You moved to lie across my legs and I held you like a mother cradling a dying child.
You stared at the window and I did too.
We exhaled exalted.
We inhaled Alleluia.
We exhaled again, exalted.
The window showed us our reflection,
Beyond was black,
Black encompassing and comforting our combined form.
We slept entwined; a two headed four-footed angel taking a nap.
The ecstasy complete.

Πηνελόπεια

Sweet Odysseus,
Here you are again and yet you have always been,
Your face so familiar and yet so astonishingly alien.
As the years grew fat and thin again between us,
As the olives came again and again to the trees,
As I aged as I imagined you aging yourself,
I could never drive your image of youthfulness and vigor from my mind.

At times you catch my vacant stare and ask me what the trouble is.
How can I explain to you this comfortable habit of longing, of waiting,
That I have fallen into?

Dear Husband,
I love you so that I long to long for you.
You have returned, triumphant, to a widow, to an old woman.

Great Hero of Greece!
Slayer of Monsters!
Idol of Men!

In the marketplace a peasant woman praised me for my loyalty and I wanted to strike her.
“Patient wife of Odysseus! An inspiration to the women of Greece!”
Bah.

I, a heroine for my waiting?
Absurd.
And to have my love return after all?
To have him avenge my honor at last, eyes blazing with love
And the lust of murder?

Andromache had no such luxury.
Hector dead and her son dropped from the battlements of Troy by our own countrymen.
Dropped, Husband, a child, by soldiers, perhaps the same men
Who sit these days in our home,
Who share our wine.
And I who smile softly at them,
Whose hand pours their refreshment,
Is my hand not as guilty as the one
That dangled that boy over the high stone wall,
That felt, at the last, the throbbing pulse in his supple heel?

He screamed as Tereseus might have, Husband.
That same scream I heard countless nights,
And had to rush into his bed chamber
To hold him as he sobbed
Wishing his dear father back,
Wishing the war over.
We prayed softly together until he fell asleep,
But never for victory,
And never for another’s pain.

Praise be to Zeus that you returned at all, my love.
But you have returned too late to fill
This emptiness.
The war and your absence ravaged my womb years ago,
And have left it barren,
A cold and shriveled thing.

Even as you seek to fill me with endless caresses,
I imagine my body is being pillaged,
As the women of Troy
Were raped by your soldiers,
And in this cruel way
Atone for their sins.