preface: FRACTURE

I have spent the larger part of my life addicted to opiates. Not addicted in the sense that all of my free moments were consumed by the search, not addicted in the sense that relationships were artificially won or lost, not addicted in the sense that I compulsively robbed people’s homes—although, yes, such disgraceful scenarios did periodically manifest themselves. I was, am an addict in the sense that at the back of every thought, at the core of every volume of feeling was, is a tiny mental footnote documenting what I was, am missing, spelling out in intricate detail how much better things could be if.

Never has that sickening acknowledgement been greater than it is today, now that I have been dragged underground by a three-year habit, and I can see as clearly as though it was spread out across the wall, those gaps on the shelf that being fucked up could have and should have filled. The tragedy of it all is that this is a habit that must end soon, one I will miss more than I miss my first lover, one that I will mourn more than I have mourned any dead friend. No matter how unhappy I might be—and I am those things in spades—the end of it all is something to fear. That fear, though, is utterly overwhelmed by the thought of the premature start of my next brush with sobriety. Why, I ask myself, was so much time thrown away caring about utter shit that simply did not matter? Four or five small, white pills and the phone bill is shredded, the empty refrigerator forgotten, the child’s braces revealed as an unnecessary indulgence. Ha! And when you say it, Lora, you must mean it. Never forget that the wreckage of a life is often fashioned from the shining scraps of other, much better and more deserving lives. Every blank but warm-faced stare is scaffolded by many others going without.

Indeed, I regret not being high for every single day of my life. Death, disease, divorce, displacement—the sun still lurks cold and small behind the West Coast’s thin, grey clouds—comeuppance, insult, injury, disgrace, failure, loss, bureaucracy: is there anything that could not have made more bearable? Thinking about the petty insults, the wretched little comeuppances that were suffered when they might not have been.

I guess I was twenty at the time—two years away from the day, Lora, that you would walk away—and although I am jumping ahead in the story, and although the tale has no bearing on the current situation, here it is:

I spent the summer of 1986 working in the Information Technology Division of the British Columbia Ministry of Finance and Corporate Affairs. Back in those days—and this was long, long ago—I was supposed to be helping a group of confidential clerks and secretaries in the Treasury Board make the move from dedicated word processors to personal computers. We were taking them from IBM Displaywriters to brand new IBM PC ATs. No expense was being spared. We were even outfitting the lot of them with their own Hewlett-Packard laser printers. The government was probably spending over $200,000 on a group of perhaps 20 or so file clerks and typists. In those days, remember, a year of undergraduate tuition at a fine Canadian public university was perhaps $750.

Even if I am charitable, and from this perspective it is easy to grant the benefit of doubt to a gaggle of fucking idiots who absolutely do not deserve it, these were not exceptional people. High school graduates, early on in middle age, steadfast and marginally competent in their jobs. Over time the lot of them had memorized all the necessary commands to underline or bold face their letters. They knew what to press to change margins, create indented prose, or create an automatic page number, but had no idea why such things needed to be done, let alone the ethereal gimcrackery of how such things happened. Parroted knowledge that pressing CTRL F6 makes a selection italic is not the equivalent of understanding why some things need to be italicized, nor does it presuppose the knowledge of what CTRL F6 really does. Pressing certain keys in a fixed sequence is an absent genuflection. Hocus pocus: all of it.

They were a close-knit group of women who spent their Friday nights at Sweetwaters, a turquoise and pink neon bar down on the South side of Market Square. So many Friday nights prowling around in animal prints, drinking silly cocktails, smoking skinny, dark-papered menthol cigarettes. They gossiped incessantly, and gave each other inordinately detailed yet bizarrely incorrect synopses of popular television programs. They worried about their weight, tried to keep up with the latest fashion, and drank coffee out of oversized novelty mugs.

In a very real way, these women were threatened by change. The new computers more or less provided a limitless supply of unassailable evidence of their profound and systematic ignorance, and in some cases, exposed some genuine cases of people who were almost functionally incapable of learning. Nevertheless, to see their resistance was stunning. It slowly dawned on me that they were actually trying their best to sabotage their new computers. Circuit boards came unplugged, cables yanked out, keyboards got drenched with coffee. One woman loaded one of the laser printers with old overhead film, and kept sending documents to print until the thing smoked and stank.

I had to provide technical support, and I spent my summer scuttling back and forth, trying to undo all the minor mischief as it happened. One even called me in for technical support, and I discovered that the problem was that she had simply unplugged her computer. Of course it would not work. What did she expect?

My supervisor ushered me into his office and began a long litany of complaint. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I almost sobbed. He told me I was rude. I was ignorant. I was insensitive. I was arrogant. I was condescending. I was pompous. He swore at me. Imagine that. At the back of my mind was the fear of being fired. The thought of it terrified me. With twenty something years of hindsight, it is clear that he never would have done any such thing. Certainly lacking both the authority and energy to get rid of me, he was simply enjoying himself, giving indirect payback for the treatment he received from his superiors. Truth be told, it was one of the first times in my life that anyone had ever spoken to me in such a manner, and although I had been high off and on for some months, I was not using during the work week. So choked with emotion, I promised to be a better person. To change. To work harder and redeem myself.

Fucker. Fat, stupid fuck. Ignorant fuck.

If I saw him today, I would spit in his fat, fucking face. As old as he must be by now, I would beat him near to death.

Ultimately, it is my fault. I did not have to be there for his little tirade. When it mattered, I could have been a million years away. If only I had thought of it at the time.

To fully catalog the things that never should have bothered me would be an impossible task. Would losing them be worth losing the rest of it too? Yes. Absolutely. There is no pleasure that the true and complete absence of pain would not trump.

Is it really too much to lament the fabric of sorrow that so well envelopes our lives from the moment of true consciousness to the great closing off of our experience? Too Goth? Too affected? The particular words of it be damned. Silly or not, idiotic or not, pretentious or not, the sad state of an empty life is none the less true for being woven out of empty beer cans and nights spent alone in front of the television. If the actions are not performed, if the words are not spoken, if the thoughts are not shaped, their distillate is still there. Existence is formed out of regret and depression, and regardless of what medical science might suggest, the great shaper is not always biochemical. Sometimes, life really is terrible. Too Goth? I hate my life, indeed, I hate all life, and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Sitting in the office, my attention wanders off to the calendar on the wall, and although I cannot see it happen, the dates lose focus and drain away. Unreachable. Irreproachable. Someone is talking. Say whatever you like, I cannot and will not hear you. Halos for everyone. Relics all around. Here is a prayer card to place on the rustic barrel that will be your tomb. On this desk, destitute savages used to sacrifice unblemished peahens to the God of Never Being Bothered By Anything. Reproach me all you like, I am no longer here. No longer now.



THE GOD OF UNKNOWABLE REASONS

The Guidebook says that the temple was built on a circular plan, and for reference, includes a measured survey, but what little remains today, takes no real form whatsoever. Not to be outdone, the Diary carefully documents several dozen Turkish Pines, Laurels, and Kermes Oaks crowding for space in broken clusters around a flattened, perimeter or well-tramped earth. The Diarist includes a list of the chief headlines taken at random from the old copies of Le Monde and Corriere del Marche that he found in the scrubby bushes near the walkway. Then he spends two pages in a supposedly exhaustive accounting of spent ammunition—from antique .69 and .704 caliber smooth bore musket balls, to .792 mm Mauser cartridges. At some point, the retreating soldiers had hung an effigy from a makeshift gallows, and, according to the Diarist, the ground was quite littered with spent percussion caps and the filth of a hastily broken camp, including the wreckage of several 1916 Mosquetons, apparently cannibalized in an attempt to construct one that would work. But now, all these years later, and except for the off-white stump of a single, carefully fluted marble column, the only real feature of the temple which remains is the broken base of what was once a low, red sandstone altar, one that had been defaced by several centuries of bored travelers. The guidebook laments that even the Temple of Dendur, with its tedious dates and unremarkable names boasts a better quality of graffiti. Indeed the Temple of the God of Unknowable Reasons is unremarkable in nearly every aspect, but you check it off from your list with some satisfaction.

You were both tired when you arrived at the dusty slope, and since the column’s severed end was just right for Lora’s perfect, heart-shaped ass, she sat down, and took a can of soda out of her backpack. Looking over the rise and out at the Aegean, she sighed. To cheer her up, you sang “Winter Wonderland,” but she was having none of it. Placing the soda can carefully to one side, she kicked off one of her white Reeboks, peeled off one tennis sock, and unhappily examined her toenail polish. From across the site, you could see a small Leopard snake sunning itself.



Somehow a voice draws me back.

—It makes one’s will enough receipt from the remainder of the body.

I have no idea what anything means, so I just remain silent.

Once an addict, always an addict: what was habit at 20 was still habit at 30 and is still habit today, no matter that it was or was not exercised in said year or is or is not practiced today.

Due to a variety of circumstances two of which were at least partially out of my control—a slip and fall on black ice in a darkened March parking lot for one, and the inevitable awakening of some long-standing genetic secret for two—I have spent the better part of the last three years on drugs, indeed, screamingly high. Blathering, dazed, incoherent, numb. Without the comfort so provided, I know for a fact that I would not have been able to carry on. Codeine, Morphine, Hydrocodone, Oxycodone, as hillbilly foolish as they seem to others, have kept me alive. Without them, some manner of despair would have led me to take my life. For those keeping score, Codeine is my drug of choice, but only because I have a natural tolerance to Hydrocodone and Oxycodone that more or less rules them out for reasons of economy.

God’s balls. There are some days that would be best never lived.

Even now, with absolute triumph safe in the slip—when armored with the absolute knowledge that by nightfall I shall be inured against all ill—I have such an antic hankering that I can barely indemnify myself against a few short hours that seem, as fucked up as it sounds, to be a most unsatisfactory eternity. Heaven? Keep it. Draw up sweet well water with Jean Calvin, John Knox, and Huldrych Zwingli all you like: I would sooner thirst in Hell knowing that just once I drank good gin.

The Submariner wanders the deck of his vessel. Watch cap, navy peacoat, ankle-rolled dungarees, smoldering pipe all a-clench betwixt yellowing gnashers. The powers that be have sent him up to untangle a great blue-footed Booby from the vessel’s communications antennae, but no sooner does he have the hissing beast by its spectacular overspread wings—it is indeed pecking the living shit out of him—the klaxons sound and the sub begins to sink beneath his feet. Our hero is left adrift on the vastness of the sea, kept afloat only by a huge, angry seabird. This is a situation to watch, boys and girls, and it is only going to get worse before it gets better, and—not meaning to give too much away at this stage in the story—it never ever gets better.

Yes, sometimes it is not good to be high all the time. I suppose that the first few times it happens, it is exactly halfway between humiliating and sobering to wake up with the taste of vomit on one’s lips, but at all times, even when there are true horrors to face, the gentle ease of the metaphysically absent night before is better than the possible alternatives. Could anyone, even for a single moment, suppose that the misery of lying awake and dreading the coming dawn is any more bearable when the terrors are real and not the product of the mind? It is ridiculous. If a person’s life is wretched under the influence of powerful drugs, it was probably already making the transit to ruin under the lens of reason.

The old man was cracking ninety, and the 1973 Mach I’s motor was practically ripping, pushing 5000 RPM as we blew through the final few traffic lights before the Royal Jubilee’s parking lot. And there I was in the front seat, not quite sitting, not quite standing, 15 years old, howling in agony as a jagged, pointy crystal attempted to navigate its way from my left kidney to the sea. It was all the fault of James T. Cook.

Cook came up with the brilliant idea that his men would not die so frequently if they consumed enough vitamin C. Lacking an adequate supplement in pill form, Cook settled on sauerkraut. Certainly it stopped all of those loose teeth and fingernails, but the men had to be flogged to eat the stuff. It was first officer Vancouver who came up with the brilliant innovation of limes, his fault that we are all limeys and not krauts.

I cannot vouch for the story’s historicity. I read it it in Alistair Maclean’s 1972 biography of Cook. Why? There was nothing else in the house I had not read. Dozens of Desmond Bagley mysteries, at least nine books on the history of Eastern Europe between the wars, a couple on Zulu politics, an encyclopedia of the Great War, and so on. It hardly matters. What is important is that the book made me think about scurvy.

The obvious modern solution to the problem of loose teeth and death was orange-flavored, chewable, 1000 mg vitamin C tablets. Using my allowance, I managed to gobble up 1000 of them in the course of one month, giving myself radiolucent kidney stones in the process, kidney stones that would naturally dissolve on their own after a few days of torture. Of course, no one figured this out at 2:00 am when my father brought me yawping into the emergency room. After a cursory examination, they shot me up with morphine, and my troubles began.

Other than a few obvious brushes with misadventure, the only serious drawback to a constant state of opiate intoxication is a certain physical inattention to detail, a numb hesitancy, a vagueness of action, a fumbling distance, tongue-tied absurdity. Yes, it has its more serious side effects, which range from periodic itchiness, to the distinct feeling that my hair literally hurts, to the rhythm of voices running deep in the backbone of night, but its benefits are near to endless. Codeine makes me calm, able to suffer the petty inequities of minor embarrassments and humiliations at work, ready to suffer through a marriage to a woman who clearly despises me with her every breath, eager to suffer through a unnamable disease which actually necessitates, mandates if you will, opiate addiction. To be perfectly honest, I would continue to trade all the pretty opposites for the ceaseless status quo. I could go on and on. The photographs of Lora, although in storage by the reservoir, are always fresh at hand, held in place by the White Mountains’ aching gaze.

Lately, I have given a great deal of thought to the prospect of overdose, and have concluded that if it has to happen, I would be content enough to die in the presence of a sleeping cat. For the lack of a better image, I crave peace, sleep, and silence. I even have one particular cat in mind. Said animal, although not without its imperfections—wholly inconsistent cycles of lethargy and playfulness, a habit of sharpening its claws on the sides of our two couches, general bitiness—is an admirable beast in the main, and when it is curled up on itself, and I find my face fringed with its soft and aromatic fur as it leans against me: that, my friends, is better than any drug. Well, perhaps not. Drugs are, after all, infinitely better than all comers. The cat is an orange one, however, if that has any effect on the equation.

A secret and secretive addiction is a tool and impetus for keen introspection, and that a cat can so easily invade such space is a cause for surprise.

For those of you keeping score, in real life I have overdosed four times. Once when I was twenty-two years old, and three times this year. No one knows this but you. No one has ever known this but you.

Regardless of what his adoring but overly critical public might think, the Submariner is not particularly worried. Being an excellent and most keen swimmer—coat discarded to The Tiny Gods of Lost But Lamented Trivial Possessions, pipe held between clenched teeth as if it were a miniature, blazing periscope—he heads off for land, the preposterous, squawking Booby still within his clutches. Noticing the vast, godless expanse of the watery part of the world, the Submariner, our intrepid hero, hatches a noble plan: he folds the great bird’s wings back against its body and uses it as a type of forward-facing outboard motor. Eager to make its exit from a wholly disagreeable situation, the bird speeds off toward shore, and our little pair make some good time indeed.

But perhaps some beginnings are in order.

Although I became wholly addicted to opiates in 1985, I had been ripe for the picking for quite some time. After the initial shock of morphine convincing me that kidney stones, ludicrously painful as they were lacked a certain conviction, not much transpired to tip the balance until I discovered Oscar Wilde. I am convinced that it is all his fault. More to the point, it was Lord Henry Wotton’s doing. He was a late nineteenth-century gateway drug comprising stripy trousers, off-white spats, black cutaway jacket, a perennially popping monocle, and an endless supply of adulterated cigarettes. By God, the man could smoke. Ultimately, my little problem is a heartless but well-preserved corpse lying on an altar comprised of Lord Henry Wotton’s “opium-laced” cigarettes, and Oscar Wilde’s hilariously naïve Orientalism and Huysmanesque prose. Bless the big poof. He gave infinitely more than he ever took.

I have no idea, by the way, what an “opium-laced” cigarette would be like, but once I read the sentence in question, my native instinct was to instantly realize that I would enjoy smoking such things tremendously. Twelve years later, cigarettes became another of my vices, and although I began smoking late in life and no longer maintain the habit—from the age of 26 to 36, ten wondrous years, I smoked on average 5 cigarettes a day—I miss it in much the same way that I miss Lora.

A predisposition—especially one whose foundation is an insubstantial line drawn between a stinking Royal Navy ship and the jiggly prose of fin de siècle Pre-Raphaelite England—is not an addiction-level event. The actual moment of truth was insufferably banal. It was either completely accidental or could be attributed to a combination of poor parenting and Boston baked beans. If my mother had been waiting for me with a bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, my life would have taken on an entirely different shape. Whatever the direct causation, the abstract of it could be blamed on verse. In particular, bad verse. I was nineteen and could not, for the life of me, write anything even remotely resembling poetry:



COLORFUL DEATH OF FASHIONABLE GIRL

strangled
by blue and white oysterjuice
rice crispies she
fell in a cloud of grey
wormspit and pink
bunnyfluff


MAN WITH RAZOR

contrary man in silver pane
stares out all blearyeyed
with an steel sliver
in the meat of his hand
intent


CHICKENS HATE MOZART

too faint of heart
for Salzburg's protege
wattled
brown clad ladies
unexpectedly expire


SAUSAGES WITH EGG

small brown tubes
of intestinally packed
groundup everything
slick and shiny in orbit
around an unfertilized
yellow sun


INHALING DUCKS

an aluminum tube with too thin
wings drifts over jealous mallards
who vanish into the open
mouthed wind tubes
of their larger metallic cousin


REFLECTION ON CAR CRASH

soft flesh fixed momentum
wavering vaguely
irresponsible
carving a path of putrefied
dead shells
and ruptured earth
flesh will be separated from metal
and both taken away


FELLING A TREE

the air was cold and still
a tree mighty and resonant
branches amputated
sounds exploded
and ropes burned
as men pulled it all
down


CEILING OF BLUE

house without a roof
empty walls and missing doors
dividing nothing
a present of the sky


GIRL WITH SUIT

sitting there
in the waiting area
she was wearing a suit
but not a jacket
instead a normal coat
nor a waistcoat
only a grey sweater
not even slacks
just faded blue jeans


WINDOWS

wood-framed anywheres
with details too fine
for hand or eye
open windows
are only frozen shut


SAILOR

stood on shore
remembering the sea
with its swells winds

thought of the strain
and toil of days
in sweat and hardship

yet wished for them back


LIZARD

like a
like a
lizard
hiss
with forked tongue
and
bask in heat hot sun
to escape cold blood
blooded heritage


TEA

as amber
as bug stone tree sap
as boiled hope chest cedar trunk broth

as sharp
as a woodwind progression
as a cracked celestial sphere


RAIN DANCE

the rain
falls
the rain
falls
and hits
hits the green canvas
the rain
falls
and drowns
the rain
falls


PROSELYTIZE

Street corner girl
Glowing, eyes
Beckoning.

The winds rose.

I wanted to speak
But could not find
The words.

As the world moved by
She was lost in time
And I smiled.


DEEP SEA
Under
The waves
Sandblasted landscapes
And outcrops of lava.


The sixteen poems provided above are those exact works—word for word—that I submitted in the first sixteen weeks of Professor Robin Skelton’s sophomore creative writing class. They were not well received. This is the seventeenth:



IN MEDIAS RES:

And I fell asleep in the
Usual way, with the soiled
Shadows of the surface
Of the sea, a gasp of waves,
Two worn rocks, the waves lower further,
Then the underside of the sea, barnacles,
Mussels & one starfish, yellow, and

I ran up the driveway shouting:
Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer, si
Forte, che come verdi ancor non m’abbandona, and
I dreamed Eros was saying: I loved her,
You know, I wasn’t just fucking her.
I meant all those things. But then
He turned into a gasp of
Gasoline fumes and coughed twice, shouting:
Leave reality alone for a while, Bub, then
He exploded and died.
Died, literally died. The dream drifted through graveyards
In a sheet made of pounded
Cedar bark and the breath of one
Dead infant, and the dream grabbed me
Hard, and with glitt’ring eye
Shook me until Eros appeared in
A surprised whiff of ancient Greek
And vaporized semen. Eros went on
For a while, then looked me straight in the
Face and said:
I loved her you know,
I wasn’t just fucking the bitch.

I’d like to think about driveways again later.

A and show then the
With its which is non-essentially open
To but the discipline of corded
Thongs on red welts always in
Silence. I can never remember the
Sick sound of the great drowning
In sleep.

Concrete walking without judgment
Along the paths which in the
Night are judgment. Passing the corners
Which lead to other corners: a
Prostitute watches while I show her
All the small but dying there
Is, including the mystery of never
Knowing why with whispers, raw and
Hand heavy over wide-spaced hips, but
Her space is everything, and all
The small but dying she sees
Are the recorded moans of rubber
Sheet melancholy, which, when cried from
The bathroom in July, only shows
How needed I am for the
Balance that will vanish eventually.

I am all the Gods you will ever need, and
Unlike all the rest, I will
Worship you forever.
Forever.

The underside is all waves
And brown wood. The missing and
Their explanations gather between the breath
Of two struggling perceptions: brine and
Sand contact in foam and broken
Crabs, their shells red and thin.

There is no stopping this progression, which
Will one day be lowered beneath
My horizon, and concealed by the
Grass, as cold as any stone.
So with due respect to whatever dreams
You might have for your future,
We will spend our forever time reminiscing about
Electroshock, suicide, and
All the other trivialities that have
Bored better minds
Than ours.

But all any of it did
Was leave me
Wondering how many others have said
These things to each other.

An and remains un-implied by the
Breaking waves’ constant stroking: the two
Forces back away into rotting wood
Grain. The head of teredo sinks
And is gone, and the writing in
Beating ink, as incoherent as too
Particular trees (the two behind my
House, a fir, a curling peach,
Or the one by that park, misshapen
With disease, which rears itself like
Mould, yielding instructions and replications like
The steady drip of a water torture,
Administered from the opening of The
Odyssey to the frost, hoary) and
Spent. A man died yesterday, struck
From behind by a poorly structured
Epiphany, spun in circles by
The world, and he fell, turning
Into cold water and three migrating
Salmon, and they too will die,
As invisible as the distance between
The wood and its supporting water,
As visible as the hand that
Separates clams from non clams, anemone
From non anemone.

Today a gull
Got hit by a car. It
Was in the road with two
Other gulls eating something dead, and
A car came, and each gull
Tried to be the last gull
Eating something dead, and two gulls
Left and one did not, then the
Whole process started again, complete.

I was told he held down three
Jobs to get a ticket to
India. The plan was to hike
To the Himalayas and look for
Shangri La: a temple whose walls bled
When cut, but he ended up
In Mexico running drugs, and living
With three women in some guy’s
House on the outskirts of Mexico
City. Of course he was caught,
Cast into a Mexican jail, then
Reeled back across the border and
Into a hospital in Vancouver. He
Phoned my friend Gim [sic] and
Said: I’ve got to be a male
Nurse, because in 1994, at the
Time when the others arrive, they’re
Only taking male nurses, no women,
Because women explode upon entering hyperspace.
Now he is better and even works,
But I always thought he was
Weird, and had too many tattoos.
I saw him on the bus the
Other day and he said: hi.

And I heard voices through the
Ache of a distant ocean
Dream. The first said: happiness is
Traveling & meeting people. Canada’s leading
Circulation agency requires junior trainees. If
You are free to travel Canada,
Over 17 and bondable, neat and
Attractive in appearance, we may have
A fulltime job for you. But Lora
Said: fuck it, it’s a rip-off, don’t do it,
No.

There is no sound for the word
That describes any action less than
The motion of stones turned by
Waves on an August beach in
The Pacific Rim and no sound for
The sand that hides the crushed
Shells of sand dollars and the
Broken spines of urchins.

The first really said my
Throat was empty with the memory
Of Hiroshima skin pictures,
Postcards of flesh flaking into young
Hands. The second told me to
Reject and search, so I rejected
It all and looked, fumbled until
I reached with handcuffs a reality
I’d thought was finished. Sometimes
A dry thought passes for all.
The third said nothing
And realized I was awake.

The stars: I rolled over and opened
The curtains. The stars: I got
Back in bed and pulled blankets
From sheets. The stars: I pulled
The sheets over my head and
Stared nowhere. The stars: I held
My arms in my arms and
Waited. The stars: they stopped shining
In four simple words said long ago.

Sing in me, Muse.

After he spoke, he wrapped his
Shoulders in a leopard’s skin.
I stood there like an idiot
And waited and waited and
Nothing happened, though I ate well,
Followed the ritual exactly, shells and
Spines, two copper coins on my
Eyelids, salt and bread in my
Stiff hands, a lock of my
Lover’s hair and the first teeth
Of my soon dead skull, empty
Skull frame, maggot farm, refuge
Of whatever had been said. Then a voice showed

Me the street, the night, the
Quad where I spent the last summer lying
On stairs, the moon, the sun,
The lost feeling, the waist
I encircled then and the one
I encircle now. It led me
Into the night I wanted it
To be, and said: let’s leave
Well enough alone, let’s return to
Now. Both arms cold, I woke,
Trapped on my face, unable to
Turn, slowly breathing in my pillow.
I almost died until I remembered
My legs: why don’t we walk
Away more often, instead of always
Trying to use our hands?

A whole table full of verse and
This week’s cold was carefully stored
In blue Kleenex—
Lora left me with strep throat,
Her friend’s copy of Death in
The Afternoon, a clock radio, an
Answering machine, and another nagging question:
Why isn’t there more space in
This world for formal attire? I
Have my tux, I have my
Tails, I have a pair of
Shoes so exclusive they look plastic,
So English that fog steams out
Of my breast pocket and wrinkles
My remaining blue Kleenex.

The surface
Of the sea, the underside of
The sea: there is no sound
So complete and so separate.

And again I drift off in my
Hollow black ship to sleep and
Walk on a tent strewn beach
With Odysseus and Diomedes, plotting to
Wake up, then mercilessly kick the
Living shit out of Achilles, and
Force the little bastard
To stay and fight, because in
Him are all our
Dreams, and the dreams of Briseis,
Also raped Briseis, quid thes abducta
Gravis Briseis.

We know well our
Parts, having heard them recited almost
Continuously since the great library
Burnt down. We know
How pointless it is for creatures
Of fate to actually try to accomplish
Anything meaningful is futile.


It might not be a tremendous accomplishment, but it does represent at least the dictionary definition of a quantum jump from those that came before. The difference? The missing skin from two incautiously inquisitive fingers, four Tylenol No. 3, and a fretful sleep on a cold waterbed. Overall, I suppose, there was no real importance to the writing of poetry except that it had been something I had wanted to do since I was sixteen or so. Being especially poorly read, I was operating on nothing except instinct and I guess it would not have been an issue—especially not one resulting in addiction—had it not been for Lora.

How can you see Lora without wanting to write her name across the sky?

At this point, she was in the process of changing majors and I was in the process of settling into mine.

That poem, by the way, lives on and will live on—forever if need be—as number 70 in Sonnet Sequence, “In Medias Res:” whereas the other sixteen are preserved only here and on a few electronic backups ranging from DVD ROMs, to single chip flash drives, to 3¼” armored floppies, to 5½” disks—second order relics honoring the God of Obsolete Data.



THE GOD OF OBSOLETE DATA



I am the God of Obsolete Data, and although you might expect that I spend my nights sleeping in boarded up libraries, or lounging in the shells of museums long since scheduled for demolition, I do not. The endless chattering of unread books annoy me, as does the constant wriggling of the fragmentary limbs on all those Attic Red shards. Boxes of them—tiny fingers and tiny toes writhe in heaps, kneecaps and elbows swinging all hey and yeah, as if their stories could ever be pieced back together. The makers’ marks inching around the display cases like blind grubs rooting for something to get stuck into. No, when I rest, I find a nice highway overpass or railway bridge. A single cornerstone makes for a droning but effective lullaby. More than that, and I would be awake all night.

Nor do I camp with the destitute men and the destitute women beneath the bridge—their stories, likewise, depress me, but being new, there is always the chance that they will one day be told. Similarly, their quantities are known. Bob is tall, one might say, and, suddenly, there it is, the notion of tall and of Bob, the quantity of measure, and the proposition that old Bob fulfils some function or purpose that might be classified and stored. It makes me weak at the knees. Jazzed up. Even something so trivial is too much to bear and for days, I must wander the halls of the local museum, running my cold fingertips across the untranslatable thoughts of Linear A. At the end of such a run, I wake up in the doorways of giant bookstores, horrible empty places where the smug cacophony of the soon to be remembered fills me with shapeless horror and makes my skin crawl.

If you wish to pray to me, wait until no is watching—perhaps everyone has gone to lunch at Chili’s to get fat and drunk—then sneak into the supply room, and begin looking for old typewriter ribbons, mimeograph sheets, backup tapes, disks.

Unused disks are not welcome sacrifices. The God of Blank Paper claimed them long ago and he is a terrifying and imperious force. If he as much as waves a tentacle at an old fashioned typewriter, the keys refuse to strike. His breath wipes minds clean and his laugh causes electrons to skip their orbitals. He told me once about the Play that Shakespeare Never Wrote. Every time the bald man bent over the table and dipped his pen, the ink pot fell over, or the quill broke, or the chair jiggled, or the paper blew away. Eventually, Shakespeare decided to stay in Stratford and turned his thoughts instead to litigation. Why, might you ask, would The God of Blank Paper ruin a potential play like that? He will not say, though some suppose that he is feuding with The God of Getting Things Done.

When you have secured an old disk—the annual reports of a minor sub-division from the late 1970’s would be an excellent sacrifice—you must chant the secret mantra while you feed the thing into a shredder. At that moment, I will be pleased, and will ensure that no one ever recalls that certain targets were missed or that expense accounts were not filed in triplicate.

If you perform enough sacrifices. If your sacrifices are to my pleasing. If much is forgotten never to be remembered, I will reward you. At night, when you are sleeping, I will glide under the steel door of your storage locker and remove Lora’s photographs, I will take her letters, I will tear out page after page of terrible poetry you tried to write for her. Eventually, you will forget her completely and she will cease to exist.

Somewhere, deep in the night, I hear the applause of thousands of tiny broken red pottery hands.



So in March of 1985, shortly before Lora’s 18th birthday, I came home from the university for lunch. In those days, my parents were not much interested in keeping house. Mother had not cooked for the nearly six years following the time she had set the spaghetti on fire—the pot had been on the element and water had been in the pot and spaghetti had been in the water for four long hours until the house filled with smoke and the pot welded itself to the stove. From that point forward, we used the microwave. Not only that, we used it individually.

I moved out about six months later, and, for a while, lived with Lora in a loft apartment on the water. We had brick walls and our friends painted abstract paintings that we hung on those brick walls. A cockatiel shrieked in a silver cage by our bed, and I bought the first feather duvet I had ever owned. The bathroom had a cork floor and somewhere, I have a videotape—made for insurance purposes—of how everything looked on one July day, and sometimes, just for kicks, I watch the thing. Ah, but all that is for another time and place to tell. I am jumping too far ahead.

Back in March of 1985, shortly before Lora’s 18th birthday, I came home from the university and opened a can of Boston Baked Beans. I poured the beans into a bowl, covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and put the bowl into the microwave. To give myself time to make toast and to ensure that the beans were hot, I set the timer to three minutes. The microwave was not only much used by that point in time, but had never been particularly powerful. With the toast ready and buttered, the microwave chimed and I opened the door. The plastic wrap was ballooned up and as I grabbed the bowl, the plastic wrap peeled back, releasing trapped steam.

I pulled my hand back so quickly that I hit it hard against an open cupboard door. Wincing in pain, I caught sight of the microwave. Thin strips of something white hung from its open mouth. Within a fraction of a second, I understood what had happened: this was my skin. The superheated steam from inside the plastic wrap had blanched at least part of my hand. I also immediately understood that I would soon be in agony—it is remarkable that an injury such as that does not hurt instantly, but instead gives one a brief respite, a cruel piece of time infused with the grim knowledge of what will be.

The Submariner has waded ashore in Ancient Greece. Before him is the gaping, vaginal mouth of a dank and moist cavern. Somewhere deep within its fleshy, striated walls, smoke and light filters up towards the sunlit world. Thinking about it all only momentarily, he hangs his hat on the nearest coat hook, sticks his pipe in his back pocket, and takes the stairs down. His wet, bare feet go slap slap slap against the warm stone, and he grows less self-conscious about the massive seabird he carries under his arm. For convenience, he swings the thing by its wings over his shoulders. The bird, oddly enough, is as content as content, and idly picks at the Submariner’s old scars. The lower he descends, the more the cavern’s warmth draws him deeper and compels him to continue. The bird is beginning to nod off.

As I had hurt my right hand, it was difficult to drive to the clinic. Shifting gears was next to impossible, but the Spectrum did not have a tachometer, so ignorance kept me safe from knowing what I was doing to the car’s engine. The doctor dressed my hand and gave me a script for thirty or so Tylenol #3. 1 to 2 as required for pain every four hours. Driving home was just as challenging as driving to the doctor’s office had been, but I managed to make a side trip to the pharmacy on my way. As soon as I was through the front door, I took four pills.

Much has been written claiming that the goal of any junkie is actually to recreate that very first time, and it is true. My life has been a quest to recreate that first sensation—whether through drugs, a never-ending string of failed relationships, petty success or useless effort. It does not matter how much one takes, refashioning the past is an impossible quest; the memory of a thing is always so much better or so much worse than the thing itself, and once damaged in such a manner, the body can never be made whole again. What has been done may not be undone.

That afternoon, I had a poetry workshop. Instead of driving, I took the time to walk—Fieldmont Place, left on Robinwood Drive, right on Shelbourne, past the twin rows of London Plane Trees (each planted to commemorate a Victorian who lost his life in the Great War), left on McKenzie and down down down, finally, past the track and into the campus proper. Through the parking lots, past the bookstore—long since renovated into oblivion—and across the quad. Banks of Cherry trees and Dogwoods blaze with pink and white blossoms. The campus’ Salish totems rise up into a low, sweet mist. Ravens call from the branches of Western Red Cedar. Barn swallows scut inches above the uncut grass, tracking unknowable patterns across the afternoon. The world is a beautiful place. Drifting into the classroom, vaguely dissociated but nevertheless aware, I take my seat, and lean back. Professor Robin Skelton arrives and we begin discussing the week’s poems—including my own. Ordinarily, workshop criticism reduces me to a very fragile state, more than half bordering on the land of silly adolescent tears.

The other students are big meanies, and class frequently devolves into shouting matches, threatened fist fights, or slammed doors. I am a sophomore, and I have already seen people leave class on one pretext or another and never return. I have already heard far more than I would have ever wanted about lives filled with grotesque abuse—a full two thirds of which I am convinced is more indicative of a pathological personality than actual reality. Every woman has been fucked by her life skills teacher. Every man has had an unexpected something stuffed violently up his ass. Every week there is a 12 to 18-line, 9 inch by 6 inch poem about someone’s dysfunctional period. Every week, there is a 12 to 18-line, 9 inch by 6 inch poem that wants to tell the world how little its author knows about politics or history or love or literature. Every week, twelve students enter the classroom clutching a ragged sheaf of blue mimeographed sheets, one copy for each person and one for the professor. Every week, we take turns reading: first the poet, then a random classmate, then Skelton. Then we set in with Skelton providing moderation and closing comments.

It is a brutal horror, and I know full well that I am the worst of the bunch. Back at the start of term, I abruptly realized that I had not read Keats or Shelley. I had not read Stevens or Eliot. I had not read Neruda or Lorca. For what it was worth, I might as well have write giant cycles of limericks about having my dick sucked by multiple orders of angels.

The only thing that keeps me going is the thought that Lora might be sitting outside the classroom—she would sometimes show up near the end of the class. Usually, she would have a can of soda for me. Through the slightest gesture is our deepest self.

I have to interrupt myself just for a moment.

I miss you so much. It is 20 years to the day since you left, but sitting here on the train you are still in such sharp relief. If I just close my eyes, those around me depart, and I can see your chestnut and blond and brown and ever so perfect hair falling gently around your shoulders as you walk off towards the kitchen, your hips swinging back and forth in perfect time to a song on the radio. The fridge door opens and you take out a lukewarm, foil-tipped green bottle. We are at the Doctor’s house. He is away and his young son is being irresponsible. The great house on the bay is full of would-be engineers. I am wearing a black-leather Schott Brothers motorcycle jacket and there is a tiny red enamel star on my lapel. It was a silly thing, but I miss it with untold resolution for I once wore it near you.

At times such as this, my memory of you is all that keeps me from withdrawing into the troubling essence of inability and error. This much about you was true. This part is a fiction right from the start. Memory tapers as it corrupts, and loss, like missing letters and whitewashed brick, shows sharp in the late afternoon sun, glinting like an abandoned hospital in a halo of rust and decay, the parking lots empty, the boarded up windows sealed with meaningless graffiti. So much life and death in the past. A whole heap of afterbirth and body bags. If this place is any more remembered or any more forgotten, it will be impossible to knock down. Filling out the correct forms will not make a lick of difference. It will never get rezoned.

Indeed, I am the Lord Protector of the Melancholic Yet Unfocussed Thought. And I urge grim immortality for all of my faithful now now now.

Perhaps I am the God Whose Prayers Are Never Heard By Other Gods.

Later that night, we sat in a hollow concrete octopus—a huge pink-painted mantle with four curving, smooth legs, each twenty feet long. Midnight was crowding us, pushing us towards to one of those simple, temporary good-byes that to teenagers seem so profound, and the more midnight edged in, the closer we huddled against one another. Clutching the last lukewarm, foil-tipped green bottle between your breasts, my arm around your perfect shoulders, we had one of those moments people think will never end, and for me at least, it never did end. The stars in the sky—their degrees are known things. There are tables. Records. Inclinations. Aspects. Transits. Such trivialities flood up unwanted. It is not so much a discrete concept, a surety, a place in the mind where the stars are known things—though they could be. It is not necessary for memory that the moment should have such precision. It is simply enough to know with absolute certainty that the stars were there. That half a world away, now, overhead they would still be.

The whole sorry business could easily transmute into an addict’s miscalculation, a whimsy, an accident gross inattention, carelessness. It could all somehow be keyed into the desire for the perfect obliteration of feeling. That is, the erasure of the memory of Cadboro Bay Beach. The erasure of that particular moment under the stars. The erasure of the stars themselves. The dissolution of the universe and all of its endless dark. I would give anything to not feel your back leant up against me. I would give anything to not smell the damp wool of your sweater against my bare arms. To not taste your hair in my mouth. But if I close my eyes, there you are.

In life, as in memory, you are a little cross.

In life, as in memory, you are a miniature cardboard Golgotha I have carefully painted in quite lifelike colors.

You are a tiny plastic Saint Peter’s, full of itsy bitsy parishioners all of them not caring who is the next eenie weenie Pope, for Microscopic Christ has returned full of subatomic glory and is forgiving everyone’s inordinately insignificant sins.

I was only half listening to you and you said something sweet, something that required a response, but I was far away.

There was something secure and safe inside you. Something that held you to me without force, without constraint—as stupid as that sounds. I have no idea what you were saying, and yet I can still feel the echo of your words passing through my ribs. I miss you so much. The date brings out the worst in me. If I were to die today, die on November 5th, I would die happily. There would be no better day for it.

O L’ora auro.

My hands find your upper arms, and I pull you ever so slightly closer, and you come closer. You always did that. At night, lying next to my wife, I put my arm over her shoulders and she withdraws, flinches away. The cat, on the other hand, the orange cat, snuffles about under the covers, and obsessively licks the back of my hand.

The Submariner has descended long enough to find himself in some huge empty space, a massive hollow holding what appears to be a half-cocked and terribly real seeming Astroland. Shivering slightly as he stares up at the disintegrated wreckage of some surreal Cyclone, he thinks to himself: okay, yes. This is familiar ground. He once did have a habit of sorts, but he has been clean for ages, and wouldn’t even know who to ask. First the good news. The Submariner has made an uneasy truce with the seabird, which he now carries like a massive rugby ball, all snugged up under his right arm. The problem is that he needs to find a bathroom as soon as possible, but whatever underground Coney Island he has found is all boarded up. Walking in front of the ruins of Dante’s Inferno, all would seem to be lost, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge scampers down from the tower and offers him six 30 mg pills of codeine phosphate in exchange for an albatross. Even Cerberus nods his three massive purple heads in agreement. Deal. A. Done. Deal. The Submariner hops onto one of the little carts and waits for the ride to begin.

Poor Coleridge was too high to tell the difference between Booby and perfect wingéd omen, and so is now doomed to walk the earth for another few hundred years getting repeatedly bitten by writhing but beautiful sea snakes. The man from Porlock is nowhere in sight. Of course, all would be instantly better if he could only get the dang Booby back where it belongs.

Skelton looks exactly like Gandalf.

Wild, white hair. Long, white beard. Black clothes. Black cloak.

A witch. An Honest-To-The-Horned-God Witch.

Four hundred years ago and we might have burnt the old man. Thick silver and turquoise and amber and jet rings chinked and clinked on every single one of his yellowed fingers, and today, I cannot explain how he got through a three hour workshop without a cigarette. He was frosted with ash, like every particle and pore of him exhaled a continuous mist burnt tobacco.

—This, Mister Amnirov, is shit.

The poem, “Deep Sea,” all crumpled into a tight ball, bounces off my head and caroms into the trash.

The crowd goes wild.

The old man called every boy Mister and every girl by her first name.

I am curiously nonplussed.

—Oh yeah, I say. I apologize for that.

—Your problem, says the Venus of Willendorf, is that you need to get laid more often.

—Or at all, says the hairy young man as if he knows something I do not. This is the idiot who has spent the last 16 weeks obsessively documenting the manner by which semen drips out of his girlfriend’s unshaven snatch. In a week’s time, I am going to tell him that the bitch should use a square or two of toilet paper or a couple of Kleenexes or a hand towel. In a week’s time, I am going to tell him that no one wants to step drunken barefoot on some dizzy skank dripped spooge at two o’clock in the morning. But this is exactly one week earlier, and I do not yet say things like that. In one week’s time, I am going to successfully discourage him from ever taking another poetry course, but until then, I am hurt.

—That’s uncalled for, I say.

No one is listening to me, and the Venus of Willendorf begins to make an elaborate ritual of breastfeeding her yawping infant. All eyes are trying to avoid the sight of her great, fat, white tits. Last week, we all discussed whether or not she should bring her latest child to class. We voted her down, but there she is, cramming four inches of dark areola into its greedy, toothless maw.

Utterly disgusted, I cannot take my eyes off the scene.

—What?

—Do you mind?

—What?

—You’re being really creepy.

—If you’re going to do that, I say, I’m going to have to stare.

Indeed I sneer at her, gracefully arching up the right hand side of my upper lip. I am shocked by the sudden realization that I can perform such a task, and that I cannot replicate the act with the left hand side of the selfsame upper lip.

—You’re making me feel uncomfortable.

—I don’t care what I make you feel, I say. No one wanted you to bring that thing to class. You just ignored us and brought it any way.

—What was I supposed to do? She says. I can’t afford daycare.

—Again, I say, I don’t care.

Their poems are every bit as terrible as mine, but they are under the impression that the only way to get a better grade than anyone else is to denigrate the work of their peers. Skelton does not help matters—every week, he makes a big deal out of taking the best writer in class out to the faculty club for drinks. I have never been invited.

Today, though, I know a secret.

—Why are you being such an asshole?

—What, instead of rolling over and licking my nuts?

Skelton is enjoying this so much that he does not intervene. He is using his time off to stare at the snub-nosed girl from New Orleans. She is five foot ten and only wears black and purple. The story is that she used to be a model, but got injured in a car accident and moved over to the West Coast. She eats up all of Skelton’s Wiccan hocus pocus and once had him cure a vicious case of the cramps by waving his jeweled hand across her belly.

I decide to ignore her and move on with my life. I turn to Skelton.

—I get it, I say. We should move on to Dermot’s poem. I promise that I’ll be able to hand in something much better next week.

—So you’re just going to dismiss—and here I cannot remember who said what and whose name was mentioned—so you’re just going to dismiss so-and-so’s criticism? You’re not going to respond?

—Pretty much, I say. Look, no offence, but you’re not a particularly great writer, you don’t know anything I don’t already know, and most of the criticism I hear is basically really ignorant. You haven’t read anything interesting that could help me. There’s just nothing you offer me other than a really simple-minded emotional reading. Not that my work has even deserved that much. In any event, I think that we should move on. It’s a waste of time to hear how I need to get laid more often in order to write poetry.

And for good measure, I give the Venus of Willendorf the finger.

—You too, buddy, I say to Mike the Hairy Man.

Okay. Okay. Okay. The only real external difference between the week before and this week, is that today I am a ludicrously stoned asshole, satellite high, unreachable, and immune to all pain. As trivial as it sounds, today I am merely putting expression to the thoughts I have always entertained. I have always been the world’s worst jerk, but until now, I have been too self-conscious to do anything about it. Today is my convocation, some invisible force has knelt me down and whacked me with its John Knox cap: Arise Alexi Isiahovitch Amnirov, W.W.J.

But all that is just the outward appearance of the thing. Internally, yes, something has indeed happened. Today, I know a secret. Today, I know for a fact that with the exception of Dermot, my classmates will never ever improve, that they will always be terrible. Me and Dermot, at least, have the promise to be better than that. I have no idea how the knowledge came to me, but it has, and I am carved out of tranquil and self-evident superiority. It is as if some powerful and ancient force has endowed me with discernment.

So the class moves on to Dermot’s poem, and I sit back in my chair, a huge smile spread across my face. Dermot is quite the man, and his prose poem is just about one half Gautier and one half Borges. No one understands it, but Skelton stays silent. Ignoring everyone in the room, I tell Dermot for what.

After class, Skelton takes me and Dermot to the faculty club. By this point, the drugs are wearing off, and I am back to my usual self. I have a single green bottle of imported beer, and head off home. On. Top. Of. The. World.

At 9:00 pm, I take four more pills. At 1:00 am, I wake up, scramble around for a pen—which is in my grey jacket—and write “In Medias Res.” At the end of the spring term, I end up getting the class’s only A.

Life continues on. My scalp is always itchy, and somewhere in there, Lora leaves and never comes back.

O, Lora. We had sex 1,640 times. Once for every year leading up to the Puritan invasion of North America. How’s that for keeping history alive? Our relationship outlasted 37 suits. It outlasted one trip to Fiji, two to Calgary, and three to Ontario. It outlasted 3 cats, 1 dog, 3 guinea pigs, and countless gerbils. It outlasted all of Piers Anthony and all of Orson Scott Card and all of Anne McCaffery and all of C.S. Lewis and some of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The only thing I remember about the last apartment I burgled is that it was what New Yorkers call a duplex—it had two floors. Reasonably unique for Victoria. Unfortunately, my memory is fragmentary. I vaguely remember a green bidet and thick, yellow shag carpet. The bidet might have had gold fixtures. It is impossible to be more precise about the apartment’s interior than that.

I do not even know why I was there. Someone was going somewhere and for some reason I was along for the ride, so I went to the bathroom to take a leak and took the liberty of looting the medicine cabinet, coming away with a healthy handful of T3s and full bottle of the loopy Purple Drank. Sad but true. After all the prescriptions ran out, I had managed to support myself for some months this way and that way. This was back in the days, remember—and with the possible exceptions of valium and speed—when no one even considered that prescription dugs were drugs. Low grade codeine pills were readily available over the counter, and the cold water coffee filter extraction method was almost idiot proof. If one got desperate, there was always the local craft store and a disgusting tea made from huge dried poppy pods. I was even able to harvest some 10 grams of raw opium from my next door neighbor—a retired police sergeant who took permanent disability leave after shooting two suspects in as many years. Opium poppies innocently grew in the strip of dirt that separated our houses. At one point in time, the whole area had been an apple orchard.

I had been using seriously for about two years. It was 1988.

The evening, although embryonic, was in full swing. Derk Wynand’s poetry workshop was due to start at 7:00 pm in room C315 of the Clerihue Building. It was 6:35 pm and I was in the building’s basement amidst the wreckage of one thousand or so suddenly obsolete VT100s. Huge line printers clattered ceaselessly in a sea of ugly linoleum and uncomfortable chairs. I needed a bathroom.

Earlier that week, and idiotically high, I had drifted into the Creative Writing Department, made mimeographs of my latest poem, and stuffed it into the workshop pickup boxes. The poem went sort of like this:

Why couldn’t it have mattered?

Five thousand birds fell, descending
Then, still, into the deserted square on their pale wings, landing
Then, still, on wire legs. The stone saints
Sang and blessed them until the stone saints died.
By midnight, jaguars and ocelots crept past the sentinels and the darkened sundials
And picked the bones.
Outside, the defaced walls broken bottles glittered in the sodium light.
The streets smelled of piss and vinegar.
Every car was a familiar icon from a half forgotten faith.
Unseen, I ran my hands over the gate.

Come home, she said,
Come home.
I would have shook out another cigarette, except
I do not smoke.
I would have taken another drink, except
I felt too ill.
I would have run
Away, I should have run
Away,
I still might
One day.
One day,
Before death and dawn,
Before winter and the hopeless lives of all saints,
Before willingness,
Largesse,
Unprivileged joy,
There will be chance again for subtle glory.
Let me tell you how it happened.

The city ached and arched
Its twisted blacktop backbone.
Its streets were the thin legs of long extinct and bone fragile birds.
My hands were tangled in their pale wings, like a rat’s tail pulled
Between piano teeth.

If this seems more than a little disjointed, fine.
There is not much more quality time,
And let me tell you how it happened.

I am cold now,
But was once as hot as fire,
As hot as a painted tail,
As brands in the jail—
Crossed nails, white hot at my brow crying thief—
As seeds hung from a half eaten corpse.
I am cold now,
So cold.

Like belly stretched cats hunting moths we can never catch,
Like moths circling a light we can never touch,
We circled each other
And came together.

Hark, the pharmacist of Ampurdan seeking absolutely nothing!

Very well, be mute.
Look for your old rubbish in the casual ranting of idiots.
Search everywhere,
Under every rock regardless of color,
In every shadow regardless of hour.
Go ahead,
Stumble dumb over dry lake beds—
Calcite mountains stinging your bleeding feet—
Walk unimpeded through fragile experience.
Above you, the dry eyes of long dead birds drop in clear hail.
Beside you, your own grinning face and bloody teeth
Stare into infinite reflections and observations and summaries
And theorems and a lengthy list of notoriously unread periodicals publishing other idiots only,
And when you wake from that stunted dream
To find only loneliness in a basement office and basement life—
Pilloried under the purple shadows
And the heels of the vigorously undid—
Scream and scrape off your anachronistic edifice,
For there is much to atone for.
Awake,
And whisper afresh in eye shining encroachment,
Avoid the broken glass,
Duck your head past the shit smeared walls and warped wooden door jambs,
Stare past the gutters and torn cigarette papers;
For we are only flesh,
And there is much to atone for.

With my lips on your nipple how can I stop?

Beethoven is you.
Cat clawed curtains are you.
A two-tone marble and wrought iron table is you.
Children bathing in Britain is you.
A massive painted claw foot bathtub,
And a toilet that refuses to flush
Are you too.
Everything is you.

It would be nice to stop colliding,
Beach our keels on a wide, sandy shore,
Set up shop in a casual and harmless paradise for once
Disclaim all vice,
Get some meaningful advice
From someone other than
Fakirs,
Interesting queers, murderers, quack doctors,
And psychopaths of all and untold description.

I remember everything so well.
It is all history.

Well to hell with history.
Society is anarchist,
Or anti-Christ,
Or a million other things,
And all of them all at once,
Marching around the globe guns in hand,
Safety off and shells away,
Complete with the tattered flags of all dreams,
And raw materials enough for several nightmares.

You were so wet.

This is the gothic nightmare of ideal love:
You savor the moment
When in the darkness,
Under a gothic moon,
On a near cloudless gothic night,
In an attic,
Perched on the tipsy spire of a deserted church,
In a throbbing graveyard,
After a bloody and mouth hungry feast,
You feel your heart stop.
My subtle apologies but
Go fuck yourself.
Myriad stars above the loggia,
Two trestle nestled lovers
Comforting one another with tourist Italian
While outside Firenza swoons into the arms of David.
Go fuck yourself.
The pale timeless sky:
She stares into his eyes,
The silken lengths of her gown trailing
Off into the space of her longing,
Their lips come together…
Go fuck yourself.
There never was a more perfect love,
A love whose hands were more pure,
Whose ears were more clean.
Go fuck yourself.
Consummated perfection in the arms of…
Go fuck yourself.
The…
Go fuck yourself.

After all,
Esmerelda is only dust,
And her dust was only ink.

And let us face it,
The tender
And still possible forever
That somewhere,
Something
Is still worth fighting for
Or at least
Walking the streets for—
Head and shoulders leaned
Into dimly lit and dangerous passing cars,
Sucking innumerable cocks
For the lonesome reassurance
Of a tightly rolled twenty,
Stuck up one flared and red-eyed nostril—
Is shit.

What happened in the garden happened long ago.
The stone wall was battered down,
And its rubble is now a lost dream of Lora,
Lora who loved us all.

Come back, I said,
Come back, this time forever.
Stop seeing the world from the mouth of a sterile hell.
Let us go back again to the garden,
Back searching for purpose,
An expanse of infinite peace
Made finite for a moment
And noticed in the space between reality
And the delicate odor of your pale hair,
Whisper afresh the subtle,
The vague and inarticulate,
Mouth again the silent litany of pleasure,
Or just shut up
And let me tell you what happened.

Not me, holding open books of dead gibberish
Repeating those solemn and foolish words
That, blurring in the near eternal evening,
Closed your eyes.

Not words, forced words,
That drowned your heart and its eventually empty reign
In a saturated solution of chlorine, alcohol
And my father’s hardened arteries.

Not theories,
Whose legs parted your legs,
Whose insane, obvious and oblivious wanderings
Shook kerosene and fire from your hair and eyes
And sank into the void between furniture stores
And all night breakfast restaurants.

And not simply easy sonnets,
That hissed through all the poems of Propertius,
That slid through all the poems of Horace,
That slithered through all the poems of Ovid,
And ended up
Bleeding in the penultimate book of the Odyssey,
Their black skinned backs broken
At every single vertebra,

But everything,

Everything,

And then after sweet oranges,
After the proverbial toast and tea,
After every line of every poem,
We met,
And the gate, for a moment,
Was open.

We ran past the birds where they had fallen,
Chased away the jaguars and the ocelots,
Made a circle of the dry bones,
And when the door closed,
You left, so
I stripped off my semen-encrusted jeans
And lay down to dream.

The bathroom was a good one. A bank of three, waist-high porcelain urinals, a vast matrix of tiny brown and cream floor tiles, subtle off-white wall tiles, and a single steel stall containing an institutional toilet with a thick black plastic seat. The stall was painted in high gloss orange. Since the bathroom was in a disused wing of the Clerihue’s basement, it was spotless. Sometimes, there would not be any toilet paper, but I soon got into the habit of carrying around a pack of Kleenex.

I used to go and stare at myself in the mirror before class, just to set everything up, create a mask that I could wear to make everything less obvious. Going to class was just as hard as a senior as it had been as a sophomore. Standing in front of the mirror, I took the bottle of cough syrup out of my jacket pocket, unscrewed the cap and drank what was left.

The road from reverie to regret is short and paved with all manner of idiocy. Instinctively, I felt a wave of horror flood down my spine.



THE GOD OF STORIES BEST LEFT UNWRITTEN

I am the God of Stories Best Left Unwritten, and whenever you have an idea in a bar or coffee house I am fearful. Will this be the time, I ask myself, when the God of Foolish Ideas will vanquish me forever? Will my powers fade further as yet another idiotic flight of fancy finds life on an old deposit slip or frayed shirt cuff? From shirt cuff to nine by six printed page is an easy transit, so it is important for me to act with haste and aggression.

Today, right now, I am glowering at you.

You are standing in the old coffee house on High Street. We are just across the new Pemigewasset Bridge, right opposite the college. You have been here many times, but you have never had a Foolish Idea before. Somehow, today is different. The coffee house suddenly loses all definition. Its rustic plank floor stops creaking beneath your feet. Your hands rest on the counter but do not move. The sounds of the young college students ebb away, slinking out the door on the odor of fresh muffins. The vast espresso machine pauses mid sniff, and a slim twist of steam freezes into an insubstantial arabesque. For one inconsequential strip of nothing, time stops dead in its tracks. Your Foolish Idea arrives, and then the world resumes its business. Instantly, ou look panicked.

This is the moment I have been fearing.

Perhaps you will not find a pen or paper. The woman who has handed you a cup of coffee is waiting for something—you have forgotten to pay for your drink. Maybe the transaction will distract you for long enough to erase your Foolish Idea from memory.

I see you digging around in your pockets, but all you find is your iPhone.

Theoretically, you could use your iPhone to write a note to yourself or record your foolish idea verbatim, but I know that you will not.

Palm Pilots and Blackberries and iPhones used to terrify me until I realized that they were watched over by the God of Not Doing Very Much at Great Expense. For years, He had been complaining that fewer and fewer of His faithful were restoring vintage motorcycles or making their way to trout streams and pheasant hunts, but lately, His mood has been much better, and He has embraced technology without reservation. Whenever you find yourself returning from the electronics store with a new video game or remote control, that was His doing. You might as well just surrender to His will and begin to follow His dark ritual.

You have somehow found a pen! Curses! The God of Lost Pens is supposed to be my ally. Usually we work in concert—when the ancient Goddess of Night arches her sinewy back across the sky and a stupid idea comes to you, we join forces to make certain that your pen is in your grey jacket and not on the bedside table where you left it. Afterwards, we head off to the Temples arm in arm and drink to one another’s health. Never again!

The woman who handed you your coffee is still waiting. With obvious clarity of mind, you hand her three dollars. You wave off the change, and she hands you your receipt.

Now, you have both paper and pen! Disaster!

My chief attribute is my ability to liaise with the other Gods. Perhaps it is because I am easy to behold. I am of average height and weight, and my clothes are simple. My hair is the color of hazelnuts, and my eyes are as pale as cornflowers. Ink stains are an anathema to me, and I will not set foot in libraries or bookstores. For a while, I had been unable to enter coffee houses, but the Great God of Coffee grew tired of the posing poets nursing a single cup of steamed milk over many hours, and now, He welcomes me with open arms. He is a jittery and random God, and flies at great speed hither and yonder. For unknown reasons, He keeps his body covered in a thick sheen of dull paraffin, and spends far too long explaining his mysteries.

You move off to the side table where they keep the cream and sugar, and with pen in hand, you begin to write on the receipt. I can see you begin to make the letter “b”. Reading your mind, I can see that you are going to write “books that can only be read in one place.” You wish to write a story made entirely out of lists of strange and surreal books… books that can only be read on the bus, books that can only be read while shopping for leather clothing, books that can only be read shortly after your first ride in a gently swaying gondola…

I recognize this Foolish Idea.

This is one of the idiotic stories that Could Have Been Written By Jorge Louis Borges But Was Not.

This particular Foolish Idea has begged pathetically for entrance into the world of men for decades, but its largely incoherent pleas have always been denied by the Council of Stories Whose Time Has Surely Come.

The last time it made an appeal, it tried to speak about the part where it lists books written entirely in English words borrowed from Spanish. Shouted down by the God of Overly Precise But Nevertheless Spurious Etymologies—at the council purely as an ex officio member and enjoying no formal standing—the story changed its tone and suggested a list of books where everything is described in only shades of red. Foolishness! Smirking and perhaps slightly over-confident, I left the council chambers without waiting for the final vote.

Now, here it was, trying to force its way out.

I narrowed my gaze and peered inside you once more.

You are about to write the letter “o”, and I watch appalled as the Foolish Idea tries to lead you to consider the concept of books that can only be read when a young man is parked outside the empty house of his vacationing lover. At this point, the memory of Lora’s trip to Suva edges into your consciousness. In the summer of 1986, she went with her family to Fiji, sailing on a converted schooner. Even at sea, she wrote two postcards a day—postcards you threw away many years ago. She came back bronzed, her hair streaked with gold and white, and when she smiles at you and puts her arms around you, your hands finding her waist, encircling her waist, drawing her as close to you as she can be drawn without becoming a part of you, which she always is and always has been and always will be, I see your hand stop writing. You put the pen back in your pocket and walk away from the milk and sugar, forgetting both your coffee and your receipt—the letter “b” and half of the letter “o” call after you in their tiny and ineffectual voices.

I am the God of Stories Best Left Unwritten, and I have won yet again.



At this point I could gloss over it all, but in actuality, I threw the bottle away, backed into the stall, slowly eased myself back on my haunches, and tried to measure my heart rate. Everyone has seen a nodding junkie, and I suppose that it is probably different across the entire spectrum of use, but initially at least, I was under the impression that one could prevent the inevitable lapse into dull stupor through careful and concise breathing, and hard focus. It is not so much that the room goes black, but that it ceases to matter. One is left piece by piece by the workaday world until nothing remains but the self, and then the self leaves also.

It is a dark ride, and our hero, the Submariner, instantly regrets being alone. Huddling and rocking in the tiny, devil-faced car, he stares up at the castle walls as a leering, pitchfork wielding demon slowly pulls the bloody stump of a condemned sinner from the jaws of hell. The Submariner passes the painted licks of orange and red flame, and descends into the gloom. After the initial shock of seeing an entire wall of wriggling severed legs and arms—we died at such a place, they cry—it quickly just becomes just so many gorillas and snakes, decomposing corpses, and evil butcher’s shops: silly stunts taken at random from Burroughsland, The HST Terror, and Cocteau-o-Rama. The Submariner is oddly disappointed. There may be nothing new to see, but he is, nevertheless, trapped for the duration.

I came to curled up like a sleepy kitty cat around the toilet, with vomit dribbling down my chin. There was a missing hour or so, and I was ruinously high, but class was still on, so I cleaned myself up as best as I could, and I tried to stumble off.

The ride is finished. The Submariner clambers up straight off, shaking his head. Nothing provokes the desire for flight more than the inability for its exercise. He would ask for his money back, but he never paid in the first place, and before any sort of complaint can be lodged, the lights go off. An ungodly squawking echoes like a gunshot, and something huge and feathery is pressed into his gut. Coleridge, that sneaky little prick, has been hiding in the shadows behind the ticket window, and before the Submariner can do anything, Coleridge runs off, tittering like an incredibly high school girl. But all is not lost. Ahhh, the Submariner thinks, reunited at last. The Booby, by now is hopelessly imprinted, and will not take its eyes off its ersatz lover/mother. What a pair! What new adventures await them?

I arrive at the mid-point of the class, the break. No one seems to mind that I am an hour and a half late. They had been bogged down discussing a cycle of short poems by the Woman Who Reads Too Much Emily Dickinson. She is not as good as the Science Student Who Writes About Indian Mythology and Science, but much much better than Everyone Who Doesn’t Get A Nickname. To my face, I am Alexi, but behind my back they call me by my proper title: The World’s Worst Jerk. I am constantly being told to dial it down, but I will not dial it down. Poetry is my life, and I have the scars to prove it.

The Kid Who Thinks He’s So Clever and I sat in Felicita’s one evening, and burnt cigarette holes in our arms debating the relative merits of Lord Byron’s plays—I won, earning the right to conclusively claim that Cain is the pick of the Romantic litter. The Kid Who Thinks He’s So Clever, whose real name is indeed Connor, sits on my right in class, but is so wrapped up in a semester long deconstruction of John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink that he has not noticed how high I always am.

Connor believes that James Spader’s character Stef is a precise analogue for Alcibiades, but although he is fond of quoting Plutarch, his knowledge of Greek history seems limited to a few stray paragraphs from Joseph Heller’s Picture This. He does not know that I have read the Heller novel, but I have. I have read everything.

—They’re both spoiled, beautiful, verbally abusive fuckers, who discard their lovers immediately after conquest, Connor says, adding as an after though, Stef is most certainly bi and is attracted to Blaine, hence his jealousy.

—No one gives a shit, Connor, says the Woman With The Yellow, Peg-Like Teeth.

Later on, at the end of term, she will throw Connor’s black Wayfarers into the water hazard at the end of the eighth fairway at Cedar Hill. Without his sunglasses, the wind will leave Connor’s sails forever, and he soon drops out.

This is her way. The Woman With The Yellow, Peg-Like Teeth thrives on hurting people, whereas I do it purely out of a heart-felt service to art.

In the first few months of term, The Woman With The Yellow, Peg-like Teeth tried to reign in my assholishness by threatening me with the existence of a shadowy conspiracy of worldwide Jews who have somehow received notice of my abrasive behavior.

—You’ll get blackballed, she said, unaware that I am indeed Jewish on my mother’s side, and, due to the laws of matrilineal descent, a potential member of said conspiracy should it exist, which it most certainly does not. I cannot work out if she is an anti-Semite. Every now and then, she speaks of the Zionist Occupation Government or Z.O.G. with something akin to melancholic affection, respect, and very little fear. For the most part, I ignore her except to stare down her shirt at her massive unfettered tits; but all I do is stare, as the drugs have stripped away my sex drive.

The break is over. I slid into the seat next to Connor and opened up my binder. The poem was there before me and I had to read the thing out loud before we can work on it. The reading is a particularly strong one. People seem at least to be impressed.

It is all lies. No true emotion, just the objective correlative in miniature: when I began to speak, the only thing I could think of was that I had to stop doing drugs.

There is a moment in everyone’s life when you awake and realize that your lover no longer returns your affections—when you first fall in love, you strip away the world, piece by piece. Obviously, there is not any room for new friends. Soon phone calls and visits to old friends dwindle. Sunday dinners are missed. Favorite activities curtailed. Busy restaurants reduce to single tables. Houses reduce to single rooms. Almost without notice, life resolves itself into a world of two, a warm, little Eden, where not even a benevolent Yahweh is allowed to walk.

It is equally true that once such an Eden is constructed, a new Fall becomes obligatory. History writes itself anew, inscribing page upon page of half-plagiarized nonsense, until all there is that final punctuation mark that one must read in the face of a departing lover. No: even though you are the only person left on Earth, I will not be with you. In my pocket, there is a bottle of pills that I will flush down the toilet. It is a promise I keep until March 18, three years ago. By coincidence, it is the twentieth anniversary of meeting Lora.

The Submariner and his pal kick around the outside of Dante’s Inferno for as long as they can manage, scrounging for old cigarette butts, and the stumps of desiccated footlongs. And then they see it, a new ride, only it is not really a ride, just a set of stairs going all the way down. Giddy and eager, the pair descend, winding ever deeper, until they find themselves in a strange room. On one side, is a platform, backlit by immense, sputtering torches. Beneath the platform, a row of wide, black leather recliners. In front, a blank screen, dusty from years and years of non-use. They sit down, side by side, and do not seem to notice when the restraints click hold—there is plenty of popcorn and the show is about to start.

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR
Every so often you sort of have to take stock of your life and evaluate how it's all worked out. Recently, I've managed to kick, and instead of feeling a whole lto better, I feel a whole lot worse. And I've deliberately waited some time to think about it. Life actually is manifestly awful in a rich and interesting number of ways. Funny, eh?

FOUND POETRY
Found poetry is something that I’ve played around with from time to time. Mostly, it doesn’t work. The texts are inherently artless, or they are so arty that it is inconceivable to actually take credit for someone else’s ideas. I began incorporating found fragments quite early on, probably around the fall of 1987 or 1988, the first being some snippets of the CBC’s documentary on the Mount Cashel Christian Brothers scandal (the followup story from 1989 on the orphanage's closure is HERE). I threw some sound bites into “Portrait” along with the instructions from a condom box, Leviticus and so on.

from 23. Portrait

and there was
So much powder in the wrinkles

Of his cheeks, that he looked
Like a peeling wall in a
Thunderstorm. The basilica of St John
The Baptist dominates the skyline, and

I thought: the head of Newfoundland’s
Catholic Church sure wears a lot
Of black:

Black alack black clack dlack elack
Flack glack hlack ilack jlack klack mlack
Nlack olack plack qulack rlack slack
Tlack ulack vlack wlack xlack ylack zlack

I wake
Up into the nightmare. Some say
It isn’t real, they argue that in the public’s
Mind is the Holy Rosary and
Basic Catholic forgiveness and human nature; the priest
Is human like anyone else, he
Makes mistakes.

Nothing particularly profound—there’s also some stuff from the Penguin edition of Petronius’ Satyricon—though in the context of “Portrait,” it worked pretty well. My operating theory wasn’t well developed at the time. Nowadays, when I make an allusion to another text, whether it’s a direct quote or some other type of pointer, I mean to incorporate the target work in its entirety. As a brief digression, the “rhymes with black” is actually from one of the very early acid poems—it never made it into the final cut of that grouping, but it does show some interest in inclusion. I try to not discard anything that can be repurposed.

Early on in the writing of Sonnet Sequence, I came across a rouge set of Scientology’s Level 8 NOTS. Or at least I think that’s what they were being touted as being. Basically, they’re sort of a list of idiotic questions that one Scientologist asks another, lower-ranked Scientologist during their weird pseudo-psychoanalysis sessions they call “auditing.” There was a strange, obsessive poetry about them, and they ended up being included in the grouping of poems—now arranged across a considerable distance—that were written for/to Lyle Daniel Neff/Steven Heighton (these figures are used in the work whenever Petrarch mentions any of his buddies, so basically when I refer to Guido, I mean either Lyle or Steve). As near as I can tell, that sequence originally went: 2, 31, 33, 48, 151, 187, 209, 271, 272, 273, 278, 283, 284, 285, 286, 296, 300, 339 and 364.

Here are 187, 273 and 339, just so that you can get a taste for how the material worked its way into the poems:

187. You’ve Got To Dig The Illegal Who Ran

Puffing and free.
Love if you have love, sit back,
Wait, and be quite correct aloud,
Dreaming psychopathic dreams like cans of other people.
Listen:
Black polar regions like envoys gathered,
Every bed was a pillar,
Great gobs of action ran from one day
To live in another looking brown
And quite unsteady indeed.

Have you agreed to try to change your ways?
Have you agreed to something harmful?
Have you agreed that you should limit yourself?
Have you agreed that you should have a bank?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't be mobile?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't know too much?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't remember?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't form habits?
Have you agreed that you should have a stimulus-response mind?
Have you agreed that you should learn by experience?
Have you agreed that you should be punished for your misdeeds?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't create something?
Have you agreed that you should create something?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't change your mind?
Have you agreed that you shouldn't change your agreements?

The sore gather around the fringes,
Remarkable and proud of the sea,
Proud of life.
I believe that I should have died,
I can look outside my window and see a hill
And on that hill is a fantastic collection of
Silence and hurt and truckloads of blocks
And stones and rubble and scrap iron
And quite a few ugly little thoughts.

Kill yourself, go on, do it now.


273. Soft Handling,

Everything detonates,
Vehicles freeze,
All the cards in certain suits hold,
Things open either way or all ways,
The screen shifts,
The titles appear but all screwed up,
Spheres and specks and the steady rain
Grow in fantastic outcrops,
Then break,
But who said I should care?

Reading this, Hugh, you must have had
Your own doubts,
What if the rain did not break
At the end of night and drenched
Our young place?
Well hear this,
I have had a long fight,
Full of halts and stops and when I look out,
I only hear strange boasts and see the shapes
Of a cloaked bit of medieval Rome.

Have you blamed yourself for another's faults?
Have you tried to take responsibility for things you did not cause?
Have you taken the credit for others' actions?
Have you failed to stand up for your own rights?
Have you worked yourself too hard?
Have you let yourself be lazy?
Have you let others get away with taking advantage of you?
Have you agreed to things you did not want?

It was a long odd divorce, Hugh,
And the retorts were like candy.
The world and its words are cheap.
Why won’t you just die?


339. In Retrospect, It All Seemed So Easy;

A steady progression from one year to
The next, but that is not quite what happened,
Or did you really die for your art?

Pebbles in the hand, the should's and would's and
Why not's of fifty or more months torn
Into love and come and some sentimental
Song about pine trees and palaces and theaters:
This grassy gloom has some
Sort of sheen to it, so buy me some anything
And pass me all your gloomy protests.
I’m the love and the buzz and the joy
And the frozen soda and the slaps and
All the other things you do not really care
To remember after all these months,
But why protest dead cults, or

Have you been too hard on yourself?
Have you been mean to yourself?
Have you made yourself suffer?
Do you think that it is better to suffer?
Have you made yourself feel hopeless?
Have you made your life hell?
Do you feel that you are undeserving?
Have you made yourself feel guilty?
Have you made yourself worry about things?
Have you tried not to want things?
Have you limited your goals?

The price for all this advice is ten billion years of servitude
Cleaning one cosmic swimming pool after another.
If you fill your pockets with pebbles it will not make
A damn bit of difference, but at least you will look
More serious when you are pulled out of the deep.


There are three really standout moments of found poetry in Sonnet Sequence. The first is a sonnet constructed out of Gary Leon Ridgeway’s confession:

328. Found Sonnet: “I’m Really Mad At Some Of ’Em” By Gary Leon Ridgway

because I didn't get a chance to pick
'em up, they want too much, they, ah, they were,
ah, the pimp was followin' me or quick
somethin' and so I'm, I just lost one, or
the next one I'm gonna do everything
I can to sweet talk her, I'm gonna talk
her into getting her out so I kin
kill the bitch, kill the first one, stalk
I didn't get a chance to kill today,
I'm gonna kill this one and I'm gonna
strangle her head.strangle her neck a ways
so it breaks, jump on her and choke, wanna
I gotta be in the mood to kill
if I, I gotta be in, mood to kill

AND THAT’S WHAT I THINK OF THAT.


The next is constructed out of a passage from Nabokov:

339. There Will Never Be A Better Way To Word This:

There are two kinds
Of visual memory: one
When you skillfully re-create
An image in the laboratory of your mind,
With your eyes open;
And the other
When you instantly evoke,
With shut eyes, on the dark
Inside of your eyelids,
The objective, absolutely optical
Replica of a beloved face,
A little ghost in natural colors.

The final one is this, which only turned up yesterday, and which will now be the final poem of the sequence, poem 365.

SO LORA HATES ME
Actually, it's a little on the comic side. Life imitating art imitating art imitating life. A poetic palindrome. Over the years, she's become increasingly irritated that the vast bulk of my creative output somehow concerns her. She actually believes that I'm obsessed with the events of 20 years ago. Obviously, she's right, but not in the way that she thinks. I actually don't give a shit about any of it, but I am absolutely married to the trope and its themes. As far as an actual human goes, she's not that important to me. I recognize that this is a pretty shitty attitude to take and I know that I've probably hurt her over the years (if, and it's a big if, she has actually read anything). I feel badly about it, but even those bad feelings have led to some useful moments. In Supervillain, I included a scene where the narrator, believing that he is seeing a ghost, hurls a cup of tea at Lora, injuring her. Here's the scene:


from CHAPTER 28

The Yellow Hotel’s moldering wraparound porch turned out to be one of my favorite places, and after discovering that every single antique tea chest actually contained tea—and non-antique tea at that, a stunning first in any appraiser’s books as far as I am concerned—the porch became as nice a place as any to enjoy the early morning sun and watch the dawn rub her eyes with the dappled Atlantic. The wild beach roses, never more than temporarily restrained, were in the process of taking over—much like blackberry bushes have done on the other coast—and were making a slow assault up the hillside, dodging from dune to dune, vying for control with the beach plums, the wild grape vines and a shifting tide of coarse sea grass. Massive bumblebees thundered around thorny tunnels while swallows tumbled and rolled above in intricate flights that constantly verged on mutual collision. Seagulls hovered motionless above the bluff.

Already, much of the slim wooden boardwalk leading from The Yellow Hotel to the beach had been lost, the fence separating off the dunes was gone, and the capsized wreckage of a dozen or so small faded cabanas was all that remained of what had probably been a smart place to spend some forgotten but fashionable vacation.

Off in the distance, Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red” eased out of The Little House and drifted down the sands toward the sea, stretching and languorous, and much at peace.

He must have been exceptionally partial to Silver Needle White Tea because there was pound upon pound of the stuff.

***

The sun was ever higher in the sky and I was beginning to feel that I had grown out of my peeling, white Adirondack chair, and that it was only natural that I should be surrounded by all of the world’s fraying wickerwork.

What appeared to be a young woman was watching me drink tea.

With as little surprise as possible, I tried as hard as I could to stare it away.

I waited for the inevitably creepy catchphrase or irritatingly demonic suggestion.

—So you’re here in the daytime now, I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

Then I hurled my cup at it as hard as I could.

The would-be apparition howled in pain and crumpled sobbing to the floor.

—Oh, God, I said. I am so sorry.

She could not stop crying and did not stop crying for some time.

On second glance, she was not young, but was close to my age.

After I had finally persuaded her to move into lobby and had bullied the poor thing into accepting a mid-nineteenth century Shaker quilt as a wrap—value be damned, I had tried to chase a living woman back to the ethereal plane by beaning her with a full majolica mug of scalding hot tea—her story came out.

She was nothing less than the curious ex-girlfriend to end all curious ex-girlfriends. I recognized her name from the cheat sheets that had been provided to me (and which included a charming Polaroid of her holding a Koala Bear in Australia, dated I think to 1986)—in the various biographies and tribute books, she is uniformly identified as Lora and I will preserve that tradition here—but I did note that almost every single published detail was incorrect: her height (5’4”), the color of her eyes (a nearly perfect brown with only the smallest flecks of gold), her hair (a thick mane of chestnut and blonde with a slight natural wave in no real direction), the shape and character of her mouth (vivacious, lively, compassionate, with giant teeth the size of dinner plates), the feel of her hands (chaffed, slightly rough). Having read so much in anticipation, and even though she was obviously and embarrassingly who she said she was, I still wanted to see her driver’s license.

It was true.

This was Lora.

Or rather she was Lora, for from that moment forward, the concept of Lora was irrevocably linked to a real woman and not to some abstract thing.

Even at 40 she was breathtaking.

She could not sit still for more than a few seconds and constantly fidgeted. Uncontrollably nervous, she giggled like an idiot at me, but had more confidence than I had expected. She became serious and I watched as deep lines instantly etched themselves around her eyes and on each side of her mouth. There was an infinitesimal scar exactly in the middle of her forehead, as if at some distant point in the past, her third eye had been surgically removed by an expert.

—I wanted to see it, she said, obviously meaning the estate.

—I can give you a tour, I said. Lora was not Paulette. There was no reason not to be sweet.

—You don’t have to do that, she said. I’ve been wandering around since dawn.

—What did you think?

—I don’t know what I expected, she said. This, I suppose. He used to send me emails a few times a year.

—Saying what? If you don’t…

—Nothing, really. I guess if I’d been paying attention. I should have replied.

—I don’t think that would have changed anything.

—It was a long time ago, she said.

—Tell me, I said, do you remember what his bedroom looked like when you met him? Do you remember what your childhood room looked like? If you saw it again—re-created—would you recognize it?

—You’re not serious.

—I am, I said. When you met him, did he have a queen-sized waterbed with blue fitted sheets? Was there a low teak bookshelf? Do you remember a clock radio?

—I don’t remember, she said. If I did, it would be the last thing I’d want to see.

—But that’s why you’re here.

—I wanted to see how he ended up, she said, not what happened to him.

—Isn’t that the same thing?

Lora sat with me for a few more minutes before excusing herself. She never explained how she gained entry into the estate, nor did she want to know why I assaulted her. I did not escort her out, and, instead, drifted off to a dreamless sleep.

***

That was from The Memoirs of a Supervillain. The book is available here and there, so be sure to buy a copy.



Okay, okay, so I occasionally post something irritating with regard to the nuts and bolts of our relationship. Mostly about my attitudes on the environment. So she got mad at me and wrote me an angry email. I replied:


I've never called you three years ago or perhaps at any time since the late 1980's. And, honestly, to me the entire episode has transmuted into a literary trope, a handy symbol useful for writing emotional shorthand. No connection to reality in the least. I use my past in the same way that zillions of other writers do when they write. I compose a conflation of all the people I've ever known, ever dated, and turn them into a ghostly sort of figure. In my poetry and fiction, I call the omnipresent female figure Lora and you're only a small part of it. Honestly, dude, I've been married a couple times since I knew you. If I miss anything, I miss those things in the past tense. I enjoyed being 18 and I miss it like crazy. Heck, you're not the only one that gets a stray and obtuse allusion.

For some reason, she never wrote back. It all worked out for the best as I now get to write poems about how she doesn't like me anymore--very Petrarchan. This is the first poem that came out of it all. I will probably swap something out of Sonnet Sequence to make room for it.


PROEM

Just voyages and a fair tide
From one stinking birth to the next:
You are all holidays and amber
While my butt does nothing
Or less.

Just how many sorry episodes
Is death—nowadays, if you meet
Someone interesting, it is just
A quick countdown to a shitty
Eulogy and inedible canapés.

Useless, proud, heated and glowing,
Rich in the things that do not actually
Make anyone rich, poor in every other
Measure—you were right, Lora,
To trade it all for a few angry
Emails. Go ahead, be pissed off,
Pout, stick out that lower lip, trip
Me, kick me, snarl and spit
While I wash your words off
An indescribably filthy floor.

The years have receded, little girl, leaving
A line of dead fish and bull kelp to rot
In the afternoon haze—by God, Lora,
I would be there, really. I really would.:
It is not like I have anything better to do.

A WORK IN PROGRESS
I don't usually make a habit of posting work in progress. Many years ago, Derk Wynand told me that Horace said to keep your poems in a desk drawer for 7 years before showing them to anyone. Frankly, I don't know if Derk was shitting me or not. I've never bothered to look up Horace's actual advice, but I've followed it all the same. So why am I trying to get this posted? Basically, I'm stuck. I want it up here just so that I can see it and try to get a feel for where it's going. I think that it's supposed to be much longer than it is, but I've sort of run out of gas. Anyhow, here you go.

SNAPPING WITH BARED TEETH:
for British Columbia

Digging its way into too many things
To properly root any one thing out.
Enough is enough. The Salal is near to
Ruined and something must be
Done.

British Columbia, you see, is in this here
Ratty Rogers’ sugar sack, squirming,
Practically pissing itself, trying
To growl out something profound before it
Sinks on down, the cold, clear sea pulling
It down, the saltchuck silencing
It once and for all. The Province has
No idea what is going on and expects,
As always, the very
Worst of the very
Worst of the very
Worst.

It can practically smell the Strait
Of Georgia.

Of course, British Columbia wants everything written
Down, described in vivid detail, put
In a book for no one to read. As a former
Colony, everything must be documented
Properly, filed accordingly and then ignored;
But that idiotic gospel is not about to get elected
Or erected anytime soon, so ignore all that noise,
Yank the West Coast out of its sack, collar
The damn thing and take it to the local RSPCA—
Slack-jawed and all limpsy—while I deface
Yaletown with pointless pretty slanders in thick,
Black Sharpie. Drowning the damn
Thing would have been too much like
Work.

You know, it is almost like
I am still and forever eighteen,
Wearing my best little party
Dress, all leant up against
A three thousand year old wall, waiting
To flirt with a teenaged
Francesco Petraca. He is going see
My gorgeous little bell
Of bleached blonde hair and fall
Instantly and utterly in love,
Don’t ya know. Thank God
I’m wearing my Wednesday
Panties.

PROTIP: Charles Lillard wasn’t Petrarch,
But he was a shameless flirt,
And that, more or less, was
More than enough.

Do you really want
Me to say it? Okay, I will:
Never apologize, never atone, never change,
Only shake your fists and tell people
What’s what. Pathetic? A little
Stupid? Lame beyond belief? Oh yeah,
I know, I know, but no matter
How lofty the words, how noble the thought,
Human ambition invariably dies in a dim-witted
Rush toward an all-too-conceivable goal:
That dog was unfit for adoption
And will be euphemized on the morrow.
If we are going to be anything, pals, let us
Be pathetic and juvenile and damn
Proud of it. If you have put away all your
Childish things, you have put away yourself.

The West Coast has to pee
And dances around from foot to
Foot, clawing up the freshly refinished floor.

Idiotic bravado and foolishness:
I won’t be coming
Back, and this, I suppose, is my way
Of saying good
Bye.

This poem, when read
Properly, is like a Wolf Eel in the cunt.

The cunt in question, by the way,
Should positively ache for it. This poem
Will not work any other way.

The Fisherman waits
For the Old King’s forgiveness, a replacement
Abalone license and some sort of half-
Arsed tax deferment. Crown
Askew, the Old King feigns wisdom
And sternly orders the return
Of a previously misplaced
VHS tape of his coronation.
But he is going on five years late with it
And since Red Hot Video went out of business,
The tape does not get
Re-shelved, but is instead dumped
In the trash. The Fisherman returns
Breathless and sweaty, entering
The chamber on his knees.
Frozen in supplication, the Fisherman
Awaits the Old King’s word and perhaps the hand
Of a choice daughter, but that was
All the quests the Old King could
Muster. Everyone, if the truth be told, has lost
Their patience with the very notion
Of questing—go ahead and laugh—
And instead watch mutely as the disk
Of the sun loses its arms and legs
And its face transmutes, transmogrifies,
Morphs back into British Columbia.
The Province, by the way, is sticky with sleep
And turns to you—quite vividly, mind you—
And says: roll over, will you and hit
The snooze. I need
Five more minutes of sleep.

Folio verso folio verso—every
Time a new page appears, a litany
Of slack-jawed nonsense words, half
Thought out bullshit crap attempts
To scribble itself down in poorly
Remembered Greek, only to edge
Its way from a ruined and quite
Imaginary landscape and into the real world.
The only way to stop it is through
Unexpected violence.

I would get a lot more done
If I wasn’t so high all the time.

No one
Is ever impressed, and smoking
All the cigarettes I have ever
Smoked, everyone I have
Ever met just stands
Around my front porch, waiting
For the collective news that all their other friends
Have died. After the telegrams finally
Arrive—bags and bags of them—the only
Thing left behind is a mere
A dunce cap of ash to spread
On some half frozen shore. One quick
Question: if I put on
My girlfriend’s panties, can we
Go and see an opera?
I haven’t been to one in so long,
And to tell you the truth,
I miss the shit out of going
To operas.

The Old King’s youngest daughter used to snort
Ground up Oxy and cry rape every fifteen
Minutes, but he got the dumb bitch into
Rehab, and now she lives in a halfway
Home and works in Tim Horton’s.

No one on television is ever going to live
My life for me—and it is both
Disgusting and disappointing
That it took so long for me
To figure this out.

Notate bene, you people of the cold Pacific:
I have been repeatedly woken up
By all sorts of irritating
Noises. Rusting busses idle interminably
Outside my apartment in Little India.
Directly outside my laundry room
Window, a thin woman with brown, rotting
Teeth sucks cocks in the alleyway. George
Bowering angrily writes shitty poems
In something that passes for Kelowna.
My downstairs neighbors actually stay
Drunk for weeks on end. The guy who got
Evicted rather than break
Up with his girlfriend, returns
Every other Friday to sell
Illegally-caught sockeye
For five bucks a fish. Virtually worthless
Knowledge continuously washes
Down on me like fire. It no longer
As much as stings and I miss
That sting in much the same
Manner that I miss the cold
Ocean and all those dank
Mats of stinking cedar needles.

If Floyd showed up, by God,
I would wave away the flies
And buy a fish—the Queen’s law
Be damned.

Sterile weapons, dead and yoked
To a horsey mist of regret: this poem is a meat
Missile, one you cannot possibly
Recall—recall, by the way, meaning
That a) you cannot take any of it
Back and b) in a few years, you will
Not remember any of it, even
If you wanted.

Life is a salad of doubt
And fate and as everyone grows old
And misshapen, a whole
Bunch of ruthlessly random
Maladies conspire
To crop the edges away
Until everyone is either content with
Everyone else or too miserable
And too drunk to care.

No amount of arugula is ever
Going to change
Anything. Frisée aux lardons is ultimately
Pointless with or
Without Southern Ontario chevre.

Ballcocks and razorblades and
Two young people screwing
Every single chance they get—
If there is more to life than that
You are going to have to work much
Much harder than I did and even if you
Do, you are never going to convince me
That I should care.

This is all about me and
Amor de Cosmos exchanging
Body fluids in an endless vista
Of fog and rotting stucco houses.
Sitting across from my agent, I said:
But I don’t want to live anywhere
Anymore. Yeah yeah, he said, missing
My point entirely, Vancouver aint entirely
What it used to be back in the 80s.

The 80s, I said. Let me tell you about
The 80s.

A feathered amusement, a slick hate
Painting, extra long with tubes for passing
Excreta and launching sneaky little
Missiles—the decade burnt like cunning,
And we all changed houses frequently until
Our skeletons were etched into our bar
Stools. That night, I stumbled back
Towards the car and lost consciousness vaguely
Near it. The blue bridge rose and fell like
The harbor’s heatbeat. The sappers dug
Down deep but the mineshaft flooded out
And killed the lot of them.
Before I knew it, ten years vanished
And I was living somewhere else.
A combination of pamphlets and lied-about
Purity, blue as blood and irreplaceable,
A sick blast of quietude and the winning
Goal scored by a giant transvestite: if you
Really want to know about the 80s,
You are going to have to visit them
Yourself.

This is just a hole I have
Dug with my framing hammer,
A special room dedicated to those
Who must wear steel-toed boots
When they fuck.

When the last big quake hit Seattle
All those years ago,
I honestly gave a shit. Tonight, all I think
About is dinner, and I have determined
That the world either needs
Another good shake, or some
Better places to eat.
It is natural: the young complain about
Growing old, and old the about being
Stupid when they were young. Seriously,
When are we going to eat?
I am famished.

My left eyelid is causing me all sorts of grief.

The golden shores are a distraction
And as I walked along Fraser,
Skirting my apartment like a bad case
Of ringworm, I flickered however briefly,
Twisting from this world to that,
And there was Tycho Brahe, rubbing
Golden snot off his shining, golden nose.

The stars, buddy, he said, and he spoke
In the accent of my youth, familiar
And throat, clicking and resonant, trained
To skate backwards out of the mouth,
Hip-checking the occasional modal verb
Along the way.

The day, he said, taking up his thought
Again, when you realize that they are
Just stars, and here he left a romantic
Pause that stirred up Schiller’s queasy little
Sprite and the two started wrestling, shirts
Off, all oiled up, and the golden nose,
Bored by its uninspiring role of facial keel, wandered
Away, snorting to itself.

Stupidity is indeed a type of devotion, a type
Of prayer.

The Pacific is a shade of nothing important blue-green,
And it mouths you like an obscure law, gumming
Your wetsuit a little too hard to be considered
Wholly playful. At any minute it could
Snap and send you to a watery cell,
Cold and alone for the rest of eternity,
While Ling Cod and Wolf Eels aimlessly
Swim far away.

Perhaps this is all a test—a handful
Of syringes kept curiously out
Of reach, a desert, an ocean, nine
Slick miles of golden, perfect
Shores framing a dull world, the
Tide stopping by only to lick
The Edge, no other part of any
Interest, the world on either side
Blue like damnation and inaction,
Without any encouragement,
The tide carries on a hate
Romance, every wave clicking
And clacking against the wondrous
Sands. If you stay awake,
You can hear it wandering around
All night. If anything the tide is too
Stunned and stupid and silly,
Staring at its always broken watch.
It comes back twice a day, hoping
That if it keeps it up long enough
One day it’ll be on time
Or the whole process will stop.

This thing is a passing
Thing, a blur, a distraction, mindless and
Wet. The sun above the Orient, the moon
Above nowhere. Merry concepts realized
Badly, poorly, ever so ineptly, constructed
From a kit you once ordered in correspondence
School. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable
Way to complete high school right up to the day
You failed. Do not form
Any concrete dreams. Breathe and wait
For your heart, gradually, to stop.

Let’s go over it all again, but without
Imposed order. The raw, unhinged
And tumblescent:

test we for here concepts enforced
warm to the gallant is the new
of where including devoted in you
the stupid but desert orient have
with a said from dream formed
said we to dull of world
I take pure golden shores with
a drifting had a lost haze of laws if realized
me click clack past to find
I fine through hate romance my
relaxation distraction nap the a
mildly action way inaction a mindless
get an over tall get teeth snagging the nape of
nowhere:

Everything looks like that inside
My head.

We will train dogs with
Castaway familiarities, swing
Throat freedoms in spent
Doggy faces—every wretched
Disappointment is a new form of
Birth control.

A coarse and perversely gallant beheading
Game based on cartoonish rules and year
After year spent drawing pictures of
Stars as they travel across incomprehensible
Speres—perhaps they all had it wrong—
And at this Tycho Brahe polishes his golden
Nose in expectation. Perhaps there really are
Massive crystalline spheres sliding around up
Above the invisible firmament, everything surrounded
By an endless ocean of watery chaos:
Would today mean any more or less? If, when we sit
On the couch watching each other age into
Blossoming ruin, would it matter if the heavens
Really did have stopped up portals and the roof
Of it all giant pillars? Our constellations
Are made out of new cars, our games
Are nothing more than chance in a cheap
Metal box. Tycho Brahe sits down
In a comfortable chair and absentmindedly draws
The stars. Generation after generation of vacant
Epitaphs, unread commentaries, forgotten
Combinations to lost locks—it is all the same to
Him. Over his head is a terrible surety,
Impervious to year after year of careful
Observation.

One day the coast is going to croak in a thick
Pool of smutty language, one that had lain
Maliciously hidden under the undulating
Dropped leaves of peaches, apricots, apples:
In the Okanagan the woman
Imagines that her father is still
Drifting back and forth, eight miles
Overhead. Air Canada bought
This nice place on the lake, Air Canada took
Her to St Germaine on a Wednesday whim, and blew
Her through the off-season Caribbean just
Because. Through some cold, watchful
Malevolence, I make the daylight drag
Through her like concertina wire. She is fixed
In place, empty handed and standing
On the back deck as the day roars
Through her red hair. The sky, my
Sky holds court above the groggy
Lake and I make her remember
Me. Quickly, deep seated reappearances title
Themselves in ridiculous little
Ceremonies, dubbing one another with absurd
But poignant titles, spreading
A paste of hoped-for rules and populating
Alcoves with innumerable maquettes—
This, my friends, is not an adult
Relationship, see how the sculptor captured
His hands, pulling at my shirt, coarse
Expression across his greedy and empty
Stare. You can see—the artist has such
A power—that he cares so little for
Me. In her mind she turns to the emissary:
I am always in search for a new Duke,
This present one works too long
And comes home with broken fingernails.

If I knew of some way of getting out of it all,
I would.

This is more pain than a tyranny
Can muster, a throne of needles
And dried leaves, half there, glimmering
Wasteland beckoning out the arrow
Slits, an immortal spiral of fading
Hope driving itself bananas on
The sea breeze, sad girls banging
Frat boys non-stop. Non-stop. Non-stop.
This is a poorly paid innocence,
A bad return on a worthless investment,
A deal that limps and refuses,
Absolutely refuses, to apply for a
Handicapped decal.

What I really need to witness is
A backgammon-inspired knife fight:
All nerdery and misshapen valor,
Dreams, tall white roses, and pretty
Replies. The participants would take it
Seriously and go to it until the women
Cried. Contain that thought for a
Moment

MARCH 28, 1984

Twenty-four years ago today—
At 3:30 in the afternoon—someone stuck
A dick in you for the first time.
That was me.
That was my dick.
Do not worry. This is a sweet
Poem. After all, it was my
Dick’s first time too. We started
Off on the waterbed—you, me and my
Dick, but the waterbed had some
Sort of problem or we had some
Sort of problem and so we all ended up
On the floor, your back on the gold shag
Rug, my knees getting an Indian
Burn. On cue, the condom
Broke. Ten days before any
Of that happened—it worked out fine
By the way, the part about the condom
Breaking—ten days before that
Afternoon, I kissed you for the first
Time. You were sixteen years old and I was
Seventeen. This poem is about those
Ten days between kissing
You and giving up on the waterbed,
But we have to start somewhere,
We have to start ten
Days earlier on March 18—
You were there, I know, I know, but
Perhaps you recall it differently
Because this is how it went for me.

I cannot remember why you came
Over. It was after
Dinner and my parents must have known something
Was up—as soon as the doorbell rang, they fled
Upstairs to read while we sat on the rumpus room’s
Brown and white striped hide-a-bed.
I was on the right hand side, and you were on
The left, a crummy, dark-blue t-shirt stretched
Across your lumpy bra, lower down, a pair of acid
Washed, high-waisted jeans rode ever
Upward. Your feet? White
Canvass Keds and tennis socks with little
Yellow and pink pom-poms.

Forever must have past because suddenly
You said you had to
Go, your mother’s red 1976 Civic hatchback was
Outside and she needed it home by 10, so
I leant forward and you leant
Forward and I moved closer and you moved
Closer and I reached out and you reached
Over and I closed
My eyes and
You got home very very late.
That was just kissing and although you had
Garlic breath, it was still pretty good.
Truth be told, it was the best night in my life.
Better than 10 days later, and better than anything
Since.

But this poem is not about March 18 any more than
It is about March 28.

This poem is about those ten days in
Between.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN I LISTEN TO CARLY SIMON'S "YOU'RE SO VAIN"

OI will try to paint the picture as clearly as I can, but be patient if I am unable.

Once you have finished committing this scene to memory, take a deep breath, close your eyes tightly and see it all for yourself.

In the evening, in the mid-summer Rhode Island early evening, in that superstar time of soft night when the sea air stalks in like a paparazzo over the sand dunes—running its slightly dirty hands over your trouser legs, hustling and vague and everywhere calling your extraordinary name—you feel merciless and alive, like you know everything, like you feel everything, like you really could hold the entire world for ransom. Like perhaps, like just maybe, like yeah what the hell, you should hold the entire world for ransom. It deserves it. At this one moment, this frozen piece of forever time, you know it deep down inside that you and you alone have the power and the right and the ability and the absolute duty to destroy every single living thing.
Look out across the vast sea. It only exists for you.

Look up at the faint tracings of stars. You put them there.

Breathe in the air. Exhale.

Everything is beautiful. Enjoy.

Open your eyes.

If I ever came close to understanding what it must have felt like being him, it would have at that precise time of day when with my back to The Yellow Hotel’s alarming bulk, I was able to survey what might have well been the entirety of the Atlantic ocean. In those moments—and perhaps it only happened the once—a sense of incredible peace came over me, and it seemed as if the world itself, with out swept arm and delicate poise, bent its knee and gracefully bowed its head. The high clouds banked in, obscuring the stars, following the lay of the land, and stained themselves pink and orange as the sun raged over the Pacific, thousands of miles away.

Perhaps that was happiness and until then I had merely been contented.

By that point in my life, I had seen the sun set—or had at least been alive and breathing for the event—well over 10,000 times, but until I found myself standing on The Yellow Hotel’s vast porch, cradling a seventeenth century glass filled to the brim with some ridiculously unaffordable wine—whose name and color I shall always keep a vital secret—I never thought that it set for me alone.

Inhale. Exhale.

In the imperceptible slice of time that your heart spends paused between beats, the world, still all bowed down and faintly smiling, gently winks.

The chief difference between us, I suppose, is that he always felt this way, even when he was clipping his toenails into his cell’s stainless steel toilet, or attempting to secure an extra tin of sardines in oil from the prison commissary. His life must have been one such never-ending moment, constantly seduced by the coquettish world batting its incredible eyes his way.

Concentrate again.

Memorize it all.

Inhale. Exhale. Close your eyes.

The deck stretches left and right, and although the paint is not only peeling but also quite toxic, the effect is not diminished. The estate stumbles off far beyond the limits of peripheral vision, but even though you cannot make out any details, you know that it is filled with such wonders. The world is an obvious entitlement, an entertainment, a jingling trinket, a thing to put into an over-sized pocket. The world is merely a rhythm created by your heart, and you possess it certainly and assuredly, not in the form of a single note or a stray refrain, but in its entirely, in every single possible composition and arrangement , and in all of them flooding over everything all at once.

Open your eyes.

The feeling of ownership and possession is almost impossible to put into words, but I suppose the same sort of feeling might have been had—say in the Bavarian Alps, perched below the summit of Mount Kehlstein, serenely sipping poor quality tea on the warm side of the chalet’s massive picture window, or standing at the top of the Mount of Olives, just allowing random thoughts to spill out like insulin.

If you close your eyes long enough, if you dream long enough, if you feel long enough, then it is simply a matter of time before you are running around in a cheap cape, brandishing a death ray of dubious authenticity, while the world sadly shakes its disbelieving head.

FRED RAYGUN KILLS CHRIST

I: METALHEAD OFFERS SOME UNSOLICITED ADVICE

Suzy had been doing Bitch! for going on a month and at least in Fred’s mind, she was rapidly turning into an insufferable cunt. But she simply had to pass the real estate boards this time around, and as the tests spanned property law across seventeen dimensions, the going was rough and complex and confusing and she needed, positively needed, all the chemical help she could muster. Bitch! was not necessarily the drug of choice as its use more or less guaranteed failure on at least one plane of reality—indeed, the depressing results had come in three years ago, before she had even thought of changing careers, but by then it was too late. On certain levels of existence, retests are mandatory and it was either go to college or get ready for a few years playing tennis with other white-collar criminals on one of the more dubious moons of Neriam. The taxpayers, so went the demand notice, are not in the habit of subsidizing failure, and it has been determined that… It was probably all some sort of complex scam—a little known dimension boasting spectacular properties no one could actually visit, charging fees for loans no one ever remembered receiving to take courses no one ever passed. The interest rates were all in imaginary numbers and the payment schedule routinely violated Planck’s Constant. She decided instead to cheat. She just hoped that all the other versions of herself were equally savvy.

Lately, Suzy – at least the Suzy of this dimension – had taken to grinding up the Bitch! pills with the flat head of a Licon fetish sculpture, then hoovering up the pink, speckled dust through a bendy straw inserted all the way into her spiral turbinates. Instead of studying, she paced their townhouse, pretending that she was going to start studying in just a few minutes. Every now and then, letters, emails, zip-notices and telegrams arriving warning her that she apparently failed some new and more complex test that she had never heard of. Textbook bills suddenly appeared, demanding payment for courses she was apparently going to take as much as a decade in the future. It was getting to the point that their credit rating was decreasing logarithmically.

The really discouraging part was that all of these universes just kept multiplying—every new potentiality, however modestly realized or barely failed, created a stupefying maze of competing realities. In her heart of hearts, Suzy knew that if she wanted any measure of success in life, she had to master all of those cocksuckers at once, and beat every single alternate reality into one master shape. It was never enough to have it all work out in this one place. However close to impossible it was—and, theoretically, in some more logically rigid universes, success might actually be impossible—Suzy, at least, was giving it the old college try. Or she would have been giving it the old college try, had she gone to college.

—Who needs an education, Fred sneered. Aren’t you glad you dropped out of high school and got a job in that auto parts store?

There had to be something, somewhere, that was significant enough to hurl at him, she thought. He had been no help at all in this; he had the habit of bursting into hysterical laughter whenever a new student loan default notice arrived on the hot grid. Worst of all, he never gave up ribbing her once he sensed a hole in her defenses.

—Fuck fifth dimension you, he mused. A little bit hotter, granted, but she’s one dumb piece of shit. I wonder what she’s doing with all that student loan money? She already maxed out the VISA getting a new rack.

Suzy chose to ignore Fred.

—Suppose we’re all writing the wrong tests, she said. Have you considered that? What if the reason I keep failing is that it’s somehow out of sync? That the two-dimensional me is trying to take a test in one dimension?

—And what sort of sense does that make? In a single dimension, paper itself is impossible, let alone a three bedroom raised ranch.

—Fuck you, dipshit.

And with that, Fred retreated to the garage. As he clumped down the stairs, he could hear her grinding up more pills, like that was going to help anyone pay the bills. Instead of trying to argue with her, it was easy enough for Fred to spend his time tinkering with Metalhead, his gleaming robotic sidekick. Although only a little more than 4 meters tall, owing to a serious design flaw and the use of profoundly substandard hyperalloy—never read robot assembly instructions while drunk off your ass—the thing weighed in at an astonishing 12,000 kilograms. Public transportation, for the most part, was out, and until Fred got up the energy to reinforce the stairs, the thing had been trapped in the basement. Bored and alone, it had shrieked blue death and continuously strobed in all available wavelengths and frequencies for a week, reducing Fred and Suzy to a shadowy half-existence, made barely acceptable through Fred’s brilliant tinkering with the medicine cabinet’s built-in autodoc. The autodoc’s delicate sensors had been re-programmed not only to sever their optic nerves every night and re-attach them every morning, but also to remove several critical bones from their inner ears. All fine in theory, but Fred’s hands were a little shaky for such delicate work. Finally, sick of living in a darkened world of limited timbre, he made some calls. Within a couple of days, the stairs were fixed up and Metalhead was no longer imprisoned in the basement. The robot was ecstatic. Finally, it was able to sit at the kitchen table like everyone else and pretend to drink Suzy’s coffee.

Since then, Fred and the robot had been inseparable.

Fred and Metalhead. Metalhead and Fred. A real team.

Metalhead, granted, had its problems. Obviously, there was the weight issue—or when space-bound, a mass issue—but there was a whole host of other more troubling inadequacies. The thing was powered by raw solar fusion delivered via a hot link Fred unsuccessfully tried to hide in obscure stars. Unfortunately, the robot was so energy inefficient that it was responsible for a string of dismal crop failures around the galaxy as it shrank stars to brown dwarfs as readily as raisins. Cooling it was close to impossible. At the best of times, the thing gave off frightening, terrifyingly withering radioactive exhaust gasses that Fred was forced to phase shift to some random location—closing his eyes, he had typed in the coordinates and hoped that it never made the local news. Nevertheless, every now and then the robot overheated, and glistening white hot, it would sink deep into the planet’s crust. At the time, it had caused quite the argument:

—They’re going to add those holes to our mean volume determination, you know, Suzy had warned. Our property taxes are going to go way up.

—Basements don’t count, Fred said.

—Of course they fucking count, Suzy said. Just like second floor balconies.

—Bullshit, Fred said. There’s no way we pay tax on a motherfucking porch.

—Hands up if you’re studying a certain class in college.

Fred scowled.

—Thought so, she said.

Fred’s solution to his robot’s heat issues was to try installing a cyanide-based cooling system. Cyanide was not a particularly efficient way of keeping anything cool, but Fred was able to make the system do double duty. Metalhead was now able to express a variety of basic emotions via the subtle pumping of liquid poison. Eye protection was mandatory as it was prone to springing inopportune leaks. Sometimes, of course, it purposely spat, and however unlikely, its aim was uncanny. One day Fred was going to have to downgrade or break its trajectory engine.

In fact, the hulking giant was so potentially lethal that tinkering with it was usually motivated out of a genuine drive for self-preservation. It was a battle just to keep up with Metalhead’s most basic malfunctions. Fred had bought it as a box of parts—the thing had been been in some sort of barn fire and Fred’s initial excitement was due to the frame and the block’s matching serial numbers. Given its age and scarcity, it would have been collectible, had anyone actually been foolish enough to collect model EC780-3C3 Servo robots. Putting it back together had been a challenge and corners had not only to be cut but ineptly filed down afterwards. Some of the corner, truth be told, had been left jagged. The only instructions he could find had been lining the bottom of a parrot cage on Zibar-9. Fred’s solution to a missing 34th page involved hiding a handful of computer chips and lug nuts in old desk drawer and then selling the desk. One unexpected byproduct of Fred’s inability to follow basic directions was Metalhead’s ability to seamlessly force apart the multiverse, carving disturbingly huge wormholes across space and time.

For the most part, the ability to travel through time at will was a little on the disappointing side. After giving himself a shiny, new Electro-static Nixogun—whose origins he could not rightly remember—Fred was basically at a loss for interesting things to do. The past was pretty dull and the fashions embarrassing.

Even with the ability to control the universe’s ebb and flow, Metalhead was a constant worry. It almost never listened to instructions, it would get caught in near-endless loops where it would make the exact same barely audible clicking noise for weeks at a time, and was prone to breaking down in bank lineups and highway on-ramps. Complicating matters was Metalhead’s latest unexpected behavior. Ever since Memorial Day, Metalhead had been behaving even more unpredictably than before.

The holiday weekend had begun early with a single mojito. A couple of hours later, after Fred had passed out, Tom “Spyzowin” Angola, jaded after being drummed out of Captain Zero’s “famous” Space Cadets, had reprogrammed the Metalhead to go on a 3.14159265 hour murderous rampage whenever it witnessed the destruction of anything more or less “round.” Spyzowin had burned the change into Metalhead’s EPROMs and there was nothing anyone could do about the programming via its remote control. The very thought of a clanking 12,000 kilogram instrument of nearly arbitrary death squealing and screeching and flailing psychotically through innocent crowds, although amusing in concept, sent quivers down Fred’s spine. He picked up a wrench and started beating at the robot’s thick, armored neck.

The last time it had gone berserk, everyone had been watching a sort of hick-ass underwater demolition derby deep under the surface of Cranibar-9. One of the submersibles was an old bathysphere, rather ineptly reinforced, apparently held together with thigh-sized rusty bolts, and early on, after being ever so lightly tapped by a shuddering Zoozoobellbloomian Dream Floatah, the thing had popped like a grape, instantly turning its occupant from liquid into a surprised and spiky, yellow cylinder. Protests were lodged, but by then it was much too late. Metalhead had sprung into action, cyanide dripping from its foot-long titanium teeth. It lurched around pulling heads off torsos, smashing everything it could smash—which given its immense size and strength was more or less everything. Hundreds, perhaps thousands had died. Covered with gallons of coagulated, multi-hued blood, Metalhead smiled and smiled. Revenge was his. The robot then charged across dimensions, skittering down a rapidly growing wormhole, spewing sub-atomic filth behind it. The damage it must have done in more less spherical, more angular dimensions did not bear considering.

Fred and Suzy had barely escaped with their lives, and the pursuing mob had only backed off after Fred vaporized it with his zap gun.

The zap gun in question, an Electrostatic Nixogun 16, was currently lying in a puddle of anisette in the middle of the garage floor, fully charged and judging by its indicator, armed and ready to go. Fred kept hammering away at Metalhead’s neck. If he managed to get the thing’s head off, perhaps he could move the jumpers or fiddle with the dipswitches. His goal was a modest one. If he moved the jumpers over slightly, it was possible that the thing’s murderous rampage could be positively re-branded as a gently loving rampage. The results would be very much the same, but the press might be a little better.

Almost on cue, the robot’s gimbals came loose and the head lolled sickeningly around on its frictionless axis, sending Metalhead’s googly eyes rolling in their red alloy sockets like the wheels in a slot machine. A moment later, the head completely capsized and tumbled off the robot’s body. As it fell end over end, Fred watched its foot-long titanium teeth gnashing in frustration and could have sworn that it was crying bitter, cyanide tears.

Before he could do anything at all, the head landed squarely on Fred’s Nixogun and although he wished he had not, he clearly heard a muffled metal pop.

—Honey! Fred called upstairs. I have to go out to the store and pick up a few things. Just having a little trouble with the robot.

—Don’t you leave that piece of shit just lying around. Take it with you. I don’t want to be in the house with it.

—A round! The disembodied head grunted. A round!

Fred reached inside Metalhead’s neck and found a bank of switches. Obviously, he had misplaced the manual years ago and was forced to rely on the robot’s internal copy, which the thing recite in a continuous loop, punctuated with what it felt were helpful comments.

—Dual in-line package switch 3 controls voice gender… dual in-line package switch 4 controls… no, you don’t need that one, Fred. It’s not switch 4. I’m thinking that… Dual in-line switch 5 determines bipedal or quadrupedal gait… that’s not it either…

Unable to realize his original plan, Fred was at least able to jury rig a large red off button onto the middle of Metalhead’s back. He had to use a crane to get the head back on, and Metalhead only made matters worse by giving Fred a running critique on correct head alignment.

—A little more to the right.

—No, your right.

—Your other right. And so on.

Finally, Fred dribbled solder on its motherboard until Metalhead stopped speaking altogether. Capable only of creating subsonic thumps, weird metallic chimes, and cacophonous shrieks and whistles, the thing was infinitely more agreeable.


II: THE BLACKNESS OF INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Even a child knows the difference between a Blast-o-matic and a Nixogun. One shoots out pretty green rays and can be set to stun. The other belches out a thick band of positrons, solar plasma and dark matter, instantly reducing all of God’s creation into a bland, quarky soup. Space Cadets carry Blast-o-matics. All the cool kids pack Nixoguns. Blast-o-matics have safety features, a coherent manual, factory warranties, and predictable ballistics. One manufacturer was in the habit of issuing product advisories and safety recalls, whereas the other simply forced prospective owners sign Byzantine liability waivers at gun point. Nixoguns were for those times where it wasn’t absolutely certain that something dead was going to stay that way. A Nixogun could remove even existential doubt. But then again, it also gave its owner a profound case of the space shakes and left a lasting impression that only a transplant could clear up.

Nixoguns were the bespoke creations of the Electrostatic Corporation, and were as rare as Siriusian Self-Extrapolating Ziewzorns or Hygonzorian Quanta-Geese. The playthings of only the very rich, if Fred wanted a replacement, he was going to have to shuffle the expense across as many credit cards as he could find. He considered going back in time and simply kicking his old Nixogun out of harm’s way, but there were two potential drawbacks. First, Metalhead’s ability to adjust the time continuum was not entirely precise—he might miss the event by weeks if not years—and second, there was always the chance that he would arrive exactly on time and be killed by Metalhead’s falling noggin. It was easier just to buy a new one. The eventuality of a broken Nixogun, however, had been predicted, and years earlier, Fred had enacted a plan. Whenever a credit card application arrived, it was easy enough to fill them in. Doubly so with someone else’s credit history. Lacking a consistent moral or ethical framework, Fred’s wallet was bursting at the seams with fraudulently obtained credit.

His ship, the Blasomäsphar, cut through the horrifying absence that is two-dimensional space with a sickening groan, folding time and existence just long enough to catapult itself from geosynchronous orbit hundreds of kilometers above Fred’s house to the other side of a nearby galaxy—a much better galaxy if the truth be told. In Fred’s galaxy, most of the spaceships were up on blocks in the front yard, parents did not attend their children’s Little League games, and everyone watched reality TV. In Electrostatic’s galaxay, on the other hand, all the spaceships were painted dark green, and the neighborhood kids played space soccer. People went to Space Restoration Hardware and bought over-priced space truffle-infused space oil at Space Williams-Sonoma.

Fred parked in the handicapped space outside Electrostatic. He hung Suzy’s grandmother’s old permit on the rearview mirror.


III: CELEBRATION

As fundamentally implausible as it was, Fred’s visit to Electrostatic was an unbridled success. Since he had even managed to escape without a parking ticket, he treated himself to a medium French Vanilla with a couple of artificial sugars from Dunkin’ Donuts.

His new Electrostatic Nixogun 16 was plugged into the ship’s cigarette lighter and would be ready to use post-haste.

Taking a sip of coffee, he began to plan the rest of the day. Metalhead’s massive body gently rocked behind him. Lately, it had become enamored with The Beastie Boys and was busy getting down to “Sabotage”. Fred turned the stereo up a little. Today was a good day. There was only one possible way to celebrate: go back in time and murder Jesus Christ.


IV: EVERY TIME A BELL RINGS

Sterility. Hopelessness. Mean-spirited destitution and no preconceived course of action. The dry earth of first century Palestine was an insult. Clay cup of wine in hand, head and body leper-wrapped to ward off the sun, Fred wanted to find Christ and get the deed over with as quickly as possible. He began by looking in all the usual places—the Temple, the local wedding hall, Simon’s house, the Garden of Gethsemane, Pilate’s Palace. Then he went to the woodshop.

Christ was a pretty good carpenter and Fred’s living room was dirty with the Son of Man’s designs—matching Algum wood end tables, a Lebanese Cedar trestle table inlaid with Cyprus and Ebony, Olive and Acacia bookshelves, tastefully varnished with Thyine. The shop was usually a zoo, crowded with giggling time tourists buying tiny wooden crosses. But today it was empty. Not only empty, but entirely absent. In its place was a brothel, full of Roman officers smoking opium and eating boiled land crabs. After a few minutes of embarrassingly bad Latin, Fred was able to determine that he had almost arrived too early, and he hightailed it out of town. Metalhead, trailing after him, cunningly disguised under an immense yet tasteful shemagh, was periodically bogging down in the sand. The robot’s solution was to fuse the sand into a vast glass plain and skate on its retractable wheels. Just for effect, it put on an attractive laser light display and randomly sent 100 meter, 10 trillion amp arcs of electricity hissing over Jerusalem’s low skyline.

Fred was impressed, but tried to stay focused. After all, he was about to kill the Son of God.

Of course, every time he got a new gun, the very first thing Fred did was murder Jesus Christ. Over the years, he had dispatched an alarmingly large number of them. Short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, clean-shaven ones, bearded ones, ones with goatees, ones with pencil-thin moustaches, ones who shaved their faces but not their throats. He had killed Serbian Jesus. He had killed Black Jesus. He killed Irish Jesus. He had melted Cheese Jesus into a greasy, orange puddle. He had kicked Three-Legged Jesus so many times in all of its nuts that he had worn through the steel toecaps of his Blundstones.

Over the years, Suzy had let Fred know that she was not a fan of all the Christ killing.

—You’re going to go to hell for that, you know.

—Oh no I’m not, Fred said. I’ve checked. I’m not there.

He stuck out his tongue. Game. Set. Match.

—I still think it’s wrong.

Her attitude, more or less, doomed countless Messiahs to various miseries. Just to irritate her, he had murdered good Christs, mediocre Christs and more bad ones than he could count. Obviously, there were a dizzying, perhaps infinite number of progressively shittier Christs, all of whom were well worth killing. Indeed, the laws of probability demanded that across the multiverse there had to be a huge range of particularly lame saviors: from those who preached violent ethnic cleansing through cannibalism to those who merely mispronounced common Greek words. Stammering-One-Eyed Jesus. Jesus of the Perpetual Stomach Flu. Jessuss with Too Many Esses. Pet-Blessing Jesus. As mathematics predicted, many Saviors were neither here nor there: Twelve-Step Jesus, Monkey Jesus, Drunken Jesus, Herniated Jesus, Hydrocephalic Jesus, Not-for-You-Native-Americans Jesus, Roller-Skating Jesus, and so on.

Other Christs—the really meek or revoltingly loving ones—just sort of showed up at exactly the wrong time and proselytized just enough for Fred to figure that they were practically begging to be killed. Heartfelt-and-Unrelenting-Sympathy-for-the-Recently-Made-Homeless Jesus had died a particularly horrific death, with Fred forcing the ragged thing to beg for mercy as he blasted its limbs off one by one with a brand new keychain Fizzpopper whose accuracy was seriously and perhaps illegally misrepresented. When Fred returned the weapon to the store, he thumped down Christ’s beatific head theatrically on the counter and demanded both an immediate explanation and his money back.

His guilty pleasure, of course, was that Fred really enjoyed throttling the good but overly preachy ones. Environmental Jesus. Hope-for-the-Aged Jesus. Vegan Jesus. All of these had been a joy to blast into smithereens. Fondly recalling how Crippled Christ had literally imploded under the pressure of a thousand suns, Fred checked the charge level on the Nixogun. So many Christs, so little time. This is how Jello Christ met his end. This is how Jerky Jesus died. This is the Last Supper as interrupted by a frenzied 12,000 kilogram robot. This is the version of the Sermon on the Mount where the mount suddenly and unexpectedly is replaced by a lava field. Sometimes, just for kicks, Fred would leap forward a few millennia just to see how it all played out. Entire cultures worshipped Satanic steel gods. People genuflected by gripping their nuts and falling over sideways. In some realities, the magazine D-Cup passed itself off as sacred gospel.

Clearly, the most rewarding Christs to kill were the ones who really were the Son of God, that sanctimonious third part of the Holy Trinity. Taking advantage of the slow revelation of the hypostatic union, Fred had giggled in glee when an angry ethereal Jesus had been blasted out of Wooden Jesus’ easily fractured noggin. Fred and Metalhead used its charred remains to roast weenies on the banks of the river Jordan.

—Serves you right, Lord. Fred muttered under his breath.

This time, however, Metalhead’s calculus had been a little off and they had landed much earlier than Fred would have liked: on Christ’s thirteenth birthday. Fred zipped up his jacket and popped its collar. The night was cold, and Fred considered using the Nixogun to set the town ablaze. He dismissed the idea. The surprise of it all was going to be a thing of wonder. Perhaps everything would work out after all.

—Well, Fred said to Metalhead, this will be a bar mitzvah to remember.

The robot nodded its assent and began to emit a low-pitched whine. Its automatic Christ sensors began to light up as they wandered through the town, causing its shemagh to catch on fire. The two followed the familiar noise of celebration into a small, mud-flanked house. Teenaged Jesus, spotty and depressed looking, was holding up a poorly-knitted hemp sweater.

—Hey, Jesus.

Fred’s finger slowly squeezed the Nixogun’s trigger.

—Merry X-mas.


THE END

TWO POEMS ABOUT PHYSICS AND ONE ABOUT DENNY'S

The poem that was once titled "Shadow of Hanged Man"--the previous post in this Blog was written about my childhood friend David, a person with whom I have not spoken now for two years. It's not that we had a falling out or anything. It's just that I have neither had the occasion to call him, nor any idea of what I would say if I were to call. We had enough in common as children and as young adults and shared a house while we were in university, but nowadays, I just don't know if that would necessarily carry a conversation. These two poems are in his honour. They are both written at the same time. He was dating a girl bizarrely enough named Lori (too close to Lora, too close). She was a wonderful girl, a little on the heavy side, but I think that he secretly liked them that way. The funny thing about their relationship was that she never saw him sober. Of course that was a recurring pattern in his affairs back then. It could not be helped.

I'll never forget the night that we met our roommate Keri. We put an ad in the paper, an ad designed to attract a female roommate as we were sick and tired of living with David's brother and with assorted other guys--unclean beasts the lot of them. Anyhow, the day that Keri finally showed up we went out to the bars and after the evening was all over, David and Keri walked down to Denny's. Along the way, some random pair of losers walked up to David and for no reason, punched him in the face, nearly knocking out a few teeth. Staggered and dazed as he was, he and Keri had the sense to take off when one of David's assailants said: I'm going to cut this guy. Ahhhh, the folk that you meet.

Denny's was always fun. We used to steal knives and forks and salt and pepper shakers and coffee mugs and water pitchers and anything else we could steal. We used to get into recording-breaking eating contests. My personal best was a Denny's two egg, two sausage, hashbrown, toast breakfast in 52 seconds. My best was not good enough. My friend Chris, when he was still a meat eater, managed to do the job in a little over 40 seconds, by swallowing the sausages whole.

Lori did actually call David up to make sure that he was alive after she had a bad dream. This was probably six or seven months after she broke up with him. David was taking some engineering class or another at the time, hence the allusion to Romberg. For the life of me, though, I can find no information on Romberg's work on convergent series... there is a nice Faustus analogue in a Larry Niven story, though, if you want a funny little example.


40. The Signal Does Not Decay,

It moves motionless through and
Against the band in the
Cable in the plastic in the wire
In the ground; in timed exact
Beats that turn, mirror and
Shift away and back, it
Turns, mirrors and shifts; undisturbed yet
Different it emerges, yet does not
Leave the band in the
Cable in plastic in the wire
In the ground, instead, it moves through
Solid itself, turns and bends
Into flash, color, shape, sound; the
Signal does not decay, but curls
Away in tracking arcs,
Heads away into tracks across and
Out of itself and into
Distance.


207. You Called Me Last Night

Because you thought
I was dead.
How nice of you after
All this time, when
I thought you’d forgotten me,
Or buried me
And everything you knew about me,
In some small place,
In a land you abandoned for greater good.

A mathematician named Romberg devised
An algorithm for finding
Converging series,
Functions that progress and
Will keep progressing, to some
Point they will never reach,
Some heading to zero,
Some going somewhere else.

I’m sure our ultimate value
Will be insignificant,
Certainly, more time passes between our
Sampled and odd little contacts,
But knowledge of the inevitable doesn’t help,
And I’d sooner cancel our remainder
Right now.


89. The Number Seven Breakfast:

Epiphany at Denny's. Christ is the
Kind of dive where too many
People order less than the minimum
Required, and waitresses got to put
Up with those three in the
Morning, drunken prostitute, facial scar patrons,
Wanting coffee forever and forever, while
Off to one side, hovering by
The ashtrays, lurks Satan, his trousers
Stuffed with stolen cutlery.

THE SHADOW OF HANGED MAN

75. I Spoke

To him on the phone yesterday
And he said: I sent you
A strange letter; it reads like
Chalk lines drawn around the shadow
Of hanged man.

The back of
The card is blue: it is
The sea, mother of all. The
Front of the card is wax:
Impenetrability. The card is rendered wood,
Boiled and bleached: we are all, beyond
Our materials, degradable.

I drew the
Card, you know, playing poker with
All five suits and my Fool of
Rods beat his three of cups.

I wrote him a strange letter
Back, and it reads like the number
Of breaths between a noose and
The floor below.

THE KING OF THE WHITE MAN, PT. 2
These poems all date to sometime in the summer of 1992, but before October 7, when I met the Dark Lady. At first, I didn't mind Wichita State University, but I had been spoiled at UVic. The BFA in creative writing at UVic was second to none, and it was certainly head and shoulders above the MFA at Wichita. Pretty soon I became a little dissatisfied with it all. I began to read a lot of Wordsworth. Too much Wordsworth. To balance my life a little, I began hanging out at the ATO frat house. The final poem in this small grouping, by the way, takes place there.


145. Sonnets Are A Stupid Thing:

Ding ling ping ming ning ting:
Master the rhythm, and master the meter,
And never remove your lips from my peter.
What ever happened to ambition?
What ever happened to the glory of
Youth triumphant, releasing the
Immortal, drawing sometimes inane question marks across
A full page of ‘fuck its’?
What ever happened to poets
Even looking like poets: a
Fancy shirt, wrists emblazoned with
Matted scars, even shitty spelling, or
Eccentric punctuation, would evoke a
Little fragment of that now
Much-faded genius. Nowadays academics
Call themselves poets, and inhabit
Ugly concrete buildings
In pointless prairie colleges.
Hey, all you talentless and overpaid
Stupid old fucks, blend
Your boring corpus of confessional crap
Together, force it, line by line into
One slim volume. Milton tried
To explain God to man. Would
You even attempt the reverse?


152. The King Of The White Man Noticed One

Night that in his bedroom window
He could see strange things:
Priests, presidents, baseball players,
All those really in the
Know. Shapes filed past one by
One, ever so humbly,
While the King of the White
Man giggled and pointed
To this miracle or that.
Sometimes earthworks rose up into
His sight, or nymph-strewn
Piles crept along like busses
On asphalt. Other times, his
Windows twinkled like stones, or
Showed old black and white
Movies of nothing at all.


154. We’re In America Now,

So mind those places called poetry.

I don’t mind telling you that I hate them:
Doves overhead and a new pinch runner on third.

We write things down in drinks
And think that $1.45 isn’t that much.

Well it wasn’t,
But a drink is now about $4.75,

And it still gives me the jitters;
How many Americas are this external?

The search is over,
If you’re reading this at all

You know what isn’t here:
The she poems, the scriveners,

We’re building some blundering Bundist gallows
But we’re running out of good things to hang.

How many Americas barf it all back
Every ounce? How many Americas turn on their nearest neighbors?

I don’t mind telling you that I hate them,
No relationship exists where no relations are allowed.


155. In This Tall Red Maze

I began with my life alone,
My life as I had lived
It. These corridors, this dumb-
Shared box, this thin glass
Strip of sky, these barren
Old fools, these were to be my
Playthings and my quarter and
My new instruction, but gaps and
Sharp accidents of mind,
Idiot neglect and drunkenness,
America and the King of the White Man,
Accumulated and added, and became,
In Lora’s dank short
Hair, fewer, and fewer and smaller
And smaller, until I understood all
Substance was poison-filled. These
Alleys, these red brick walls
Were specific physic against life,
And they drew me into their
Idiotic composition until I was
Alone with my life again.


156. In Autumn They

Close the tennis courts and
Drain the pool, two, maybe
Three feet lower than the
Ladder’s first step. Now the
Land can freeze safely, no
One’s going to swim or
Play tennis. As for me,
When the snow piles up
Around my basement window, and
Snow follows me in at
Night, when snow shapes itself,
And styles itself
Into my life so completely,
So utterly, that at times
I am snow, then I
Want to drift outside in
My shorts, and swim a
Few dozen lengths.


157. Listen:

You’re real small,
That’s the trouble.
You’ve got a nice
Nuclear TV thing happening,
Brazenly bursting like
Stars and embroidered eternity spent
Between loud and light.

Your fears watch
Your own twisting missiles,
Forty wards and infinite time later,
And you’re awake and funky
With seasons,
Down dew in willows,
And your soul moves big.

Don’t.
There’s a series of loud colors that post
Warnings to ladies,
And the
Jokes are all still there.

Listen,
Your sort of people
Must actually continue unabated,
Leave here and go on to other places
Again and again.


158. These Are The King Of The White Man’s Blueprints

For the coming revolution: rent
A U-haul, a really large
One, 22 feet long with
A 7 liter diesel heart.
Drive it through Idaho, and
On no account stop, keep
Going until the sweat suffocates,
And you choke and gasp
And wake mercifully alone, for
Once, with the sky.
159. The King Of The White Man Claims
Fucking is the only important act. I nod.
I should know about this one;
I’ve done it enough to
My life.


160. This Is A Careless Place Where

Things either muddle through, or
Are boarded up and left
For the next generation. Sheen
After sheen of paint competes,
And in places overruns, countless
Layers of paper. Nails jut
And loll from each wall.
The last people here stripped
Two rooms, two doors, twelve
Feet of baseboard, then gave
Up. We know better, we
Know that behind all old
Facades are even older structures,
And behind old paint is
Only more of the same.


161. One Day At The House,

Or so they say, an
Armadillo wandered into the parking
Lot. It must have hitched
A ride north from Texas,
On some semi’s axle. My
Friends tried to catch it,
But it bolted and leapt
Back onto the road. All
The cars you can see
Have spectacular numbers of fist-
Sized dents, and the sky
Goes slowly green.

POEM FOR MICHAEL VICK
This poem is not part of the series, but is comprised of a block of circa 1985 Alexi Amnirov poetry which had been randomized. It's a good exercise that I invented many years ago to trick myself into believing that I have never discarded a poem, merely kept revising existing poems written when I was young. Take all of your poetry, remove the pre-existing lineation, remove the punctuation, then shuffle the words around and group them into lines of five or six words. Now, you can create new poems out of the practically random phrases, working them into some semblance of sense. Here is the scrambled text with which I began:

eel many things the fisher waits
fisher’s for the king forgiveness which
received will not be I chose
to wisely and sternly be return
to to his arms see the
a sun turning into face that
I is all humanity woke folio
a verso folio verso fool’s parade
the and election of thoughts of
the fools into gospel words of
in fools hang slackjawed reams and
carefully reams of dreams inscribed carefully
the described never excised book trade
with should have died the scribe
mimetic what use is reproduction outside
waistcoat jacket a she a she
girlfriend pants wearing fact working personally
going on opera okay they store
shaver here’s this ice collected dunce
island disgusting over sell supposed for
this making poem ho hoe and
happened take

and here is the finished poem:


Snapping With Bared Teeth:

Digging their way into too many things
To properly root any one thing out—forgiveness,
You see, is in there squirming,
Practically pissing itself, trying
To shout something profound before its
Guts are hauled out of its stinging belly;
But that idiotic gospel is not about to get elected
Anytime soon—ignore all that noise,
Collar it and take it to the pound,
Slack-jawed and whimsy while I inscribe careful
Waistcoats with pointless pretty slanders,
Do you want me to say it? Okay, I will
Never apologize, never atone, never beg,
Only shake my fists and tell…
Ah, but no matter how lofty the words,
Invariably it ends in a dim-witted
Rush toward an all-too-conceivable goal—
The dogs were unfit for adoption
And will be euthanized on the morrow.

THE KING OF THE WHITE MAN
In order to provide Sonnet Sequence with some larger internal structures beyond the median division between Lora's life and death, I arranged some of the poems into 'runs'. The longest of these 'runs' is The King of the White Man, which forms a narrative of my time in Kansas. Structurally, it is broken into four distinct elements, the first covers the basic landscape of the state, running from January 7, 1992 to some time in the summer.


136. Kansas Is Worst Place In The World:

It is the end of the world,
The nowhere place,
A vast flat ugly hateful spite-filled Babylon,
Right at the center of the center of hell.
This is America in all of its glory.
This is America, cancerous and fat in the belly.
This is the America of the lost and defeated.
This is the America that grows wheat,
That accidentally shoots itself in the ankle during robberies,
That stands on the street corner drinking Colt 45,
That drives to the nearest shopping mall,
That watches baseball and beats its wives,
That bowls and then shoots the fuck
Out of its high school.

This is the America of the White Man,
The America of the black man,
The America of the red man,
The America of the dead man.

This is the worst place in the world.


137. A Patinated Face Turned With Woman Scorn:

Lips and eyes and chin chiseled and
Caught in one small aspect of
One small word:
No.

This is the word
That greets every traveler:
No.
This is the sandy desert
That makes others rich:
No.
This is the holy shrine
From which gross infections emerge unhindered:
No.

Send me your rich,
Your greedy, let’s populate this
Place with the mediocre, those
Who strive for the average,
Or who are abnormally tall.
This is a trivial
Country of evil and will
Unfetter any proportion, and love
Only those with tight, designer
Genes.


138. And Hate

Hate this place as
It consumes you, and now,
As the sidewalk lolls out
Like an idiot’s tongue, and
The great Kansas sky drops
Its rain, my eyes are
Drawn to a crushed turtle
Shell on the road; four
Limp turtle legs point vaguely
Away. I heard the crack,
Like nothing else, it was
The sound that death makes,
It was the sound of
The nowhere place yawning,

And the scroll of the
Nation unfurls, matching the blacktop
Stitch for white paint stitch, and

A thin dark soul stalks out,
Lights a cigarette, points to
A dull bruise on his
Bony arm, and says:

There was once real need
To do something about this little
Habit of mine, but, you
See now, it’s just too
Late so, I might as
Well just enjoy myself.


139. The King Of The White Man Betrayed

His last nation, devoured
His last family,
And now disavows all but
Guts and glory.

He works
In Wichita, Kansas
Selling Fritos
In the 7/11 at Woodlawn
And Twenty-first, and behind the
Counter late one night, and
For no real reason he
Starts to sing:

Oh hail
To the rat-faced god
Of greed.
Oh hail
To this nation
Of crap.
Oh hail
To the people who sell me
My speed.
Just thank God
That I’m not shooting smack.

Which was a lie. He didn’t realize it, but
Spears and cadavers and crosses litter
Every baseball diamond in Kansas. Perhaps
The sky’s so big here, it
Makes your head seem small.


140. The King Of The White Man Coughs, Clearing

His old tired voice. He
Takes out an old school
Note book. Here is another song
About Kansas, he says:

Oh my dog’s
Dead and my cow’s sick,
My wife’s left me and
I’m drunk, yeah, yeah.

The King of the White
Man stops here and thinks
For a while about his
Own life.

It’s sad, he says,
’Cause it’s so true.


141. When I Arrived, I Replied,

I said, when I got here,
I said, when I got here,
I said, hey, stupid,
Let me talk, damn it, when I got here,
And he let me talk for a while,
When I got here, I said, it was, like,
Oh you fool.
He never listened.


142. He Was The King Of The White Man,

And he fed on the slaughter
House air down by the
Rail yards, where the Sante Fe
Boxcars still roll in,
And he used to lurch
Down North Broadway, and haunt
The Adult Education Center. He’d
Peer through the plastic wrappers
Of cheap skin books, all
The time hoping for more
Than two money shots for
Every $6.95 spent. I guess
He dimly suspected that somewhere
Among the glossy magazines and
Video boxes and love toys
Was his perfect companion, his
Other half, his once loved
Mercedes, his true soul mate.
The King of the White Man held
Onto something deep inside,
Some sense, not of revenge, but of
Its precursor. He wanted to act
Preemptively, bring the matter
To a crisis point before anyone had
Plans to avert it.
He used to sit in his garage and carefully
Hand roll his cigarettes, taking
Tobacco from a soft leather
Eye glass case. He’d zip it up and open
A beer without glancing
At the wall clock. Then, there’d always
Be a little ritual of wiping
The remaining grease from
His hands before he lit
His smoke.
He turned to me once, and said:

Quiet these
Petty voices and admire the
Tableau of the last two
Years. Which one of you
Is going to suck my cock?


143. There Are

Always those few thoughts, which
Remain unremembered, like your face
Traced in a dusty mirror;
They become obscured by surface
Matters: how cold will it
Be this winter, how much
More can we take before
Our lives slide away and
We alight in rooming houses,
As insubstantial as long-ago
Earned money, drunk and now
Gone. Since no next
World notion can bring anything
Back, our well-rehearsed dreams
Are lost to simple want.

Then
The King of the White
Man breaks in, and he says:
Given the choice I’d rather
Eat than starve, it’s a
Pretty easy call. What’s your excuse?


144. So It’s Back To Kansas;

The land of no horizons,
Where the blue green sky
Yawns and spits tornadoes into
The spring; it’s a land
Of stains and heartless fields
Of animal feed. Kansas drives itself
Drunk on its red dirt. I’ve
Been keeping an inventory of
Things killed on the road,
Things maybe I’ve killed on
The road: turtles, birds, squirrels,
One ghastly bloated possum corpse that
Hissed at me, and pumped
Sugar into the air as
I walked past, its naked
Tail pointed to the ebbing
Cars, and its thick white
Teeth leered at the day’s
End. The King of the White Man saw
Me, waved, and smiled.

CHRIST CHURCH
One of the main conceits of Sonnet Sequence is that I met Lora in a graveyard. It's an image that gets repeated in a number of different poems, and it's a conceit that's obviously not true. I actually met Lora at a pizza place: The Raven's Wing, at the University of Victoria. I wasn't a student there yet, but she was. I went with my buddy Brent, for the express reason of meeting Lora. As I described earlier, she was going out with Roger at the time, but I didn't pay him very much attention, and, sight unseen, had already vowed to steal her away from him. Within minutes, I was playing footsies with Lora under the table.

In the world of the sequence, I place our meeting in the graveyard of Christ Church Cathedral, which is the Anglican Cathedral for Victoria. It's my favorite church in the area, and is quite beautiful. I put the action beside a stone wall that is being removed by workmen who are in the process of renovating the church. For many years, you see, it was unfinished, but in the late 1980's, they somehow got enough money to fix the place up. The timing, of course, is all out of whack. It's not like you can reconstruct my life out of these poems. It wouldn't work out properly. Anyhow, here are the graveyard/church poems:


4. The Terza Rima Poster Girl (Disorganized, Super Hot),

Eats an apple:
Each bite is measured,
Each bite dances around

The core. Three women wait there
On the wide lawn, leaning on their
Umbrellas with their thin, dark gloved hands.

The grass by the wall is matted down where
The workers have put their sledgehammers for lunch;
The wall is dark with rain, the heavy air barely

Restrains the disinterested Pacific. The backhoe
Driver watches; he knows that the concrete is much too hard—
Cannot be smashed by hand.


5. Crows:

Late in the afternoon, the black birds
On the park bench hunched over and were silent;
Rigid, black heads turned their black eyes
As she and I met; later, even the crows hopped away hissing.


7. No People Gathered

Crying, but Wagner’s Tristan should have been
There, silly horned hat pulled down across
An immature pout, mourning dead Isolde,
But there were only four men,
An old sledgehammer and an obstinate
Graveyard wall.

If you are reading this poem in bed, struggling,
Perhaps, for a philosophy that will always
Get you up in the morning, forget it. Everyone
Is embarrassingly naked in here, and an angry
Gaggle of poorly-dressed peasants is waiting outside
With pitchforks, just in case they see anything move.

This book only opens at an unmarked crossroads
Halfway between Avingnon and nowhere else.


8. I Remember When We Met,

The March skies were silent and
Overhead the moon reeled,
Crazy sick and sweating,
Panting for breath, vomiting, dizzy—
Too screwed up by far, too screwed up
For mistrust, too screwed up,
For that matter, even for common sense.
We cradled the moon in our laps,
Blossoms from the trees falling everywhere around,
And later, in the graveyard,
Lora told me that her love
Was a single star, the
Sky crumbling and the wind
Chasing clouds with suspicion.
Not even in the sad distance
From cigarette coals to thin
Smoke is silence better captured
Than in her living river,
Which still hauls down my bones.


The sweater in this poem, by the way, was by Mexx. It was a present I gave to Lora on Christmas day, 1985. She looked awesome in it, but it was relatively cheaply made and soon became plagued by irreversible pilling.


9. A Long Time Ago I Said To Her,

You are wearing
The same sweater you did
The day we met. It was
Newer then, the colors fresher,
The weave tighter, now it
Hangs on your shoulders like
Something lost. Get rid of it,
Carry it upstairs to where we
Store old things, where folded it can rest
With all your letters and
Your mother’s broken clock.
That sweater belongs a different me,
So put it away.

This was 20 years ago now, and in a way I was right,
When Lora and I met, times were different,
Notes turned and infiltrated cold traditions,
Intoxicants drew themselves all unawares;
Wet glue and kite wind traced out odd tracks on half-defeated windows,
Necropolis walls crumbled like empires,
And despite all my now plights, spring fingered itself slowly
Into some creepy eternal March,
And there she was: complete—
With one crazy pink and yellow and peach acrylic sweater.

The fall never came, then the spring never came again.

This poem was about some sort of defeat, but 20 years later,
It is just too hard to tell.


This next one, number 17, is a bit of a cheat as I blend Lora with some woman I picked up at a breakfast restaurant in Wichita in 1992. Her name was Rebecca and she was an absolutely gorgeous, smoking hot, half-Japanese grade 3 teacher. We dated for a while but it never went anywhere. So what I've done here is to give Rebecca's poem a final stanza (which if you look carefully is almost a sonnet) that ties it in with the rest of the series.


17. Was There A Trail

Left through the low waves,
Or abstracted through a distant sound: cue
Anguished sighs, soft laughter,
Caustic wracking sobs… all manner
Of clichéd cacophonous nonsense indeed;
Or were the outlines of your
Latitudes and longitudes simply
Carried by innocent night
Past an open window? Were
There any signs? Are there ever
Any signs? No matter.
Without other vexations and dreaming
In fragments taken from our
Last conversation, I feel,
To use plain words, no
More confusions, no more easements,
But a gentle slow progression
Towards you. And what drew
Me to you? If it
Was not delicacy or efficiency,
Then perhaps in a storm’s
Meandering green wake I saw
Your reflection and quite deliberately
Began approaching. Allow this much.
In return, an image surfeiting
For the lost March sky—the
Plain below thatched with winter
Wheat and red earth, the air
Above pliant to the sun—in return,
An image that stands for
All of that as it circles
Overhead, pouring grim rain onto
A stubborn concrete wall will hold
You and house you and show you off forever.
I know you are waiting for something,
Some life, some great switch to be pulled, waiting
For someone to say something
Forever and forever and forever.
Perhaps one day the trail will
End, meaningful stones will gather
At your feet, the tall grass will drift
Away and all those other shallow
Epiphanies will become forgotten, and
I will appear as sure as the spring.


These last two poems comment on Christ Church itself.


35. If After

The manner of men I
Have fought with beasts at
Ephesus, what advantageth it me
If the dead rise not;
Let us eat and drink,
For tomorrow we die.


36. Inside This Church Everything Is

In memory of, or dedicated to, or named after
The dead; their flags hang
From the vaulting, their names
Are inscribed in books, their
Ashes hide in soul-sized holes.

There are four other churches mentioned in Sonnet Sequence: another Anglican church in Victoria, Notre Dame in Paris, the medieval cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, and Christ Church Cathedral in New Haven, Connecticut. I shall get to those sooner or later.

GIDDY UP

Ahhh codeine. Just what the doctor ordered. I believe that I shall be writing poetry later on today. Keep checking. In a way, I'm more than a little worried about this development, but in a way, I'm not. I'd rather be high than troubled by what's currently eating me up.

NOW AND THEN
I think that one of the cool things that people don't really realize about poetry (not that anything about poetry is even remotely cool from an objective point of view) is how long these things gestate.

Back in 1984, a bunch of people including Lora and her boyfriend and my friend Brent were over at my parent's house. My folks had both a swimming pool and a pool table and a VHS machine so their house was a pretty popular place to hang out. Every week or so, provided the parents were out somewhere, I hosted a little movie and party night.

On this particular night, Brent had just had his wisdom teeth yanked out and was feeling a little anti-social, so he and I wandered off, and were soon joined by Lora, whose boyfriend tagged along behind her. It was obvious at that point in time that Lora and I were going to hook up and that her boyfriend, Roger (who never got to roger her, dear readers, as Lora was untouched virginal territory when I began my mighty crusade of total violation) was going to be launched on what was probably going to be a fantastic career as a pathetic cuckhold. To pass the time, Lora, Brent and I wrote stupid little slamesque poems on the glowing green screen of my Apple //+ while Roger watched in horror.

Roger had this annoying habit of saying the word "cough" whenever he discovered the blatant sexual innuendo that was going on between Lora and me. Eventually, I got sick of hearing the word "cough" and I wrote this poem...


AAUUUGGGHHHHH xii

HOLY FUCK TYPETHING HE DIDIT AGAIN
HE DIDIT AGAIN
IF HE DOESIT
AGAIN
I'M GOING TO KILL HIM
(cough)


Okay, so it wasn't much of a poem, but that was a long time ago and I was very young. A few weeks after that fateful movie night, I began nailing Lora against the headboard of my waterbed (actually, the first time we did it, we did it on the floor as we were unable to navigate the tremulous seas of that jiggly bag of rancid liquid), and Roger, of course, ultimately found out. He got so angry with me that he came over to my house, and I thought that I was going to have to kick his ass. Instead he showed up with a badly-written poem and began crying. I wish that I'd saved the poem, but I didn't. Instead, the years passed and finally I wrote a little poem for him. It's the only poem in Sonnet Sequence that isn't in my voice.

I usually claim that this poem is addressed to either Lyle Neff or Steven Heighton, but it isn't. Lyle Neff and Steven Heighton, either individually or as a sort of tag team, appear as the Guido Cavalcanti figure in the series with this one exception. This little poem. It's entirely for Roger. Do I feel guilty? No. I am incapable of feeling guilt. It's not something that troubled me, not even at the time. Matter of fact, I recall reading his poem to all of my friends and laughing my ass off.


267. This Is A Dead Man:

The driving insane wishes and wants masqueraded
As a bus full of reality, and drove from one lost empire
To its twin; if he does it again, he is a dead man.

The phone lines rake across the evening
Into an uncontrollable habit. Poor me, let’s end it
Now. It is not a question of loss, but of smiling
Heads and eleven busted teeth, none of them white.
Without change, we are all dead men.

When was the last time you really thought
About the moon, or an ex-sister-in-law, or
Inhabited planets, or anything you thought about
Before you turned thirty? You are a dead man.

Give it up for me, take me aside and say:
Yes, I am the corrupter, I am the development
Of unjust little ideas and small brains.
Take me aside and say:
I am the guy who leaves cigarette butts just
About everywhere, I am the one who has done
Nothing now for years; give up like me.

You were never alive.

BUSTER
Buster was my wife's cat. She got him when he was a little kitten from some tattoo studio where he'd been hanging out behind the dumpsters. He was a really great little guy, but when he was around three years old he got poisoned by anti-freeze, and taking him to the vet's and having him euthanized was probably the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life. I still miss him. Much more so than I miss Lora, and that's such an odd thing to say, but it's true. Buster, at least, knew how to fetch and slept all snuggled up next to me. That's gotta put him in the winning column as far as I'm concerned.


332. Jubilate Buster:

For he fell off fences;
For his short, orange fur;
For he enjoyed inexpensive tomato paste;
For he only caught two birds
And both of whom richly deserved their fate,
Dumped at the back door
With mingled ceremony and disgrace;
For he slept sideways on the bed
When it was occupied,
And on the pillow, with manners,
When it was not;
For he scratched the couch,
But rather added to its charm by distressing
Gently its fabricks;
For never stepping in wet paint;
For he oftentimes was trapped in trees
And had to be rescued by ladders
And with much swearing
And cursing;
For he only drank from dripping taps
And 3 ounce Dixie cups (TM),
And once got drunk on a bottle cap of wine;
For he chased, caught, carried and returned
Bottle caps as a sport
For the rest of his life;
For the game of bottle cap
Even played at 3 am when sleep was desired;
For yelling at the falling snow;
For hiding under the couch on the Sunday previous
To the 4th of July;
For enjoying, with great delicacy,
Fat free vanilla yogurt;
For being afraid of most things;
For picking things up with his front paws
In mimickry of hands;
For carrying plastic milk zippers in his mouth;
For keeping his milk zippers and bottle caps
In his food bowl for safe keeping;
For he only once caught a mouse;
For his friend, Gray Kitty, who ate his food;
For his nemesis, El Gatto Blanco Y Negro,
Who skulked;
For his bete noir, Calico Cat,
Who malingered;
For his fair weather friend, Frankie,
Also a gray kitty,
Who out of sympathy,
Also had to be rescued from many trees
And with much swearing and cursing;
For enjoying being brushed by the tomato plants
In the sunshine;
For eating Max Cat orange and Max Cat salmon;
For growing thin when Max Cat was denied;
For sitting under the picnic table in the rain;
For his remarkable garlic dance,
Impossible to describe or replicate;
For sleeping on the bookshelf in the office;
For head butting late at night to say hello;
For licking all of his belly fur off
Until the vet suggested Prozac (also TM);
For playing and frisking;
For publickally ignoring an expensive cat water fountain,
Preferring, instead, the faithful tap;
For secretly using the expensive cat water fountain;
For being the subject of drawings and paintings;
For chasing a laser pointer light until nearly broken,
And for panting exhausted on the floor,
Still desiring the red light;
For staying off the tables;
For leaving cat foot prints on the white sofa;
For eating many moths;
For being a master of yoga, knowing cat, child,
Downward facing dog, cow and other poses
Naturally, and for stretching them out every day;
For not eating foul tasting ants;
For chasing the reflections of many watch crystals;
For refusing to come in sometimes at night
And running around the garden, making sport,
Mistaking curses and foul words
For praise and support and an indication of score;
For sitting like a roasting chicken
And staring at absolutely nothing for hours
Until everyone remarked on the creepiness of it all;
For getting stuck on the roof;
For getting stuck on the roof in the sleet
And crying to be found;
For washing constantly;
For politely cleaning behind his ears;
For being neutered;
For refusing to foul,
In any way,
His own home;
For being a long cat, belly stretched;
For his improbable number of nipples;
For being brushed once a day;
For coming to the brush when asked;
For meeting a skunk, face to face,
And not freaking out and getting sprayed;
And for not getting sprayed again,
Although it only didn't happen once;
And for playing with children;
And for biting gently and then licking,
Never breaking the skin;
And for never scratching,
Although equipped with sharp claws;
For liking children;
For wearing a dog collar,
Nametag and bell;
For licking toes;
For being curiously and inexplicably hypo-allergenic;
And for purring in French, ron ron,
Perfectly bilingual;
And for having a fetish for gray cats;
And for sleeping in the sunshine
Until too tired;
And for being loyal;
And for making it home
When it should have been impossible;
And for sleeping peacefully,
For one additional night
At the foot of the bed;
For drinking water out of an offered palm;
And for saying goodbye;
And for dying peacefully,
Head gently falling to the blanket,
Eyes closing;
And for being a friend
For three difficult years.


352. The In Also Up:

The cat’s back legs twitched twice
And he crumpled forward onto his front
Paws as they gave way beneath his small weight.
The needle came out of the iv tube,
The vet said something and then said
He is gone, and that is pretty much all
I would like to remember; and in the recess
Of my imagination, in the mansion
You have occupied for so long,
I hear you say: but this was just
A cat, and I guess you are
Right, but I cried all the same,
More, if the truth be told, than the day
You left.

SPACEMAN
I guess that this is pretty important news if you read this blog. I'm more than a little nervous, more than a little scared. It's been a difficult couple of months now, but everything seems to be okay. I'm hoping that the poem is pretty straight forward.


SPACEMAN

The tumult of it all is making
Those around you
Sick—on the monitor, the drifting
Cosmos shifts from black
To gray in unbelievable
Striations and you in the middle of it all—
By God, the universe must love
You, but tethered to it as to
Me on the other side of the screen,
You are in such profound blackness
And silence that I cannot help but hold
My breath.

The world is indeed a distant planet.

On July 20, 1969, I was three, sitting
Cross-legged on a rag rug, watching
The screen roll and flicker, and I suppose
Like everyone else on earth, I held
My breath—I don’t remember. What I do
Recall is a hand on my shoulder, steadying
Me where I sat. My father’s father died
A few years later and I wish I remembered
A little more about him than
That, but even that much will do.

Staring at the screen these 36 years
Later, I wish he could hold
My shoulder again and watch
You float in space—alone
But loved—while your mother turns
Her head away from the monitor
Because she wants to wait
A few more months before
She meets you.

THE DARK LADY
Husker Du's cover of "8 Miles High," Camper Van Beethoven's "Take the Skinheads Bowling" and Miles Davis' "Round Midnight:" the first three songs I heard in the presence of the Dark Lady. There's so much to say about her. She appears in Still Life, so I suppose that's the best place to start... oh yeah, this takes place after everyone is dead of the flu or something.


CHAPTER TWENTY: THE POET SHELLEY WASHES ASHORE AT VIAREGGIO

There is a scarecrow walking in the middle of the road. Awkwardly. Randomly. Listing like a ship in a muddy field of stubbly winter wheat. All skinny broomstick arms and skinny broomstick legs. All elbows and knees.

There is a scarecrow walking in the middle of Route 1, and this scarecrow is dressed for a formal party, a wedding or a high school prom, or the perhaps the coronation of a minor, regional, corporate beauty queen.

Three button tuxedo jacket in black cashmere and satin. Beige tuxedo shirt with seven rows of black-edged ruffles running from Count Dracula collar to waist, and open all the way down. Cut-off satin-striped trousers, randomly amputated from mid-shin to mid-thigh. Long black wool socks. David Eden crocodile/lizard shoes in two absurd shades of blue.

Pushing a rickety rusty shopping cart full of cheap booze. Box wine. Jug wine. More box wine. Inexpensive, domestic sparkling wine. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap.

But then again, I forget myself, all booze is inexpensive nowadays.

The scarecrow has what later turns out to be a Baccarat Massena water goblet in the shopping cart's cup holder. Once every so often, he abandons pushing the cart to take a drink.

It is the Poet Shelley.

The Poet is a scrofulous creature, spotty and knock kneed, with varicose veins and unbelievably pale skin. He has a greasy widow's peak combed straight back and buckled, filthy nails bitten to the quick.

One Sunday, he told me that his parents owned a golf course on the Isle of Wight in Southern England, and that he moved to the US to be a college student in Kansas and simply never moved back.

He didn't have a reason.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, he explained.

Shelley's Wife's Idiot Half-Sister-who may or may not really be related to any of them-said once that Shelley really came from either Northern Kentucky or Southern Indiana: she couldn't remember which; but Lord Byron sneered at her and said that she was thinking of The Simpsons. The Simpsons, he said, were a Northern Kentucky family.

Shelley didn't let on either way.

His accent is fantastically fraudulent, bordering on the hallucinatory.

I pull over.

Since he's in the middle of the road, I am right beside him, and I can wind down the driver's side window and we can talk, face to face.

Old man, he says.

He was just in Gable's and is attempting to get back to the Villa Diodati by walking slowly along Route 1. He's just past Sycamore Way, past the lavender house, but apparently has been trudging along for some time.

Can I help? I say.

Capital idea, he says, in his fake accent. Would you like a drink? He holds up a bottle of champagne.

And I would like a drink, so I have a drink with the Poet Shelley. We sit on the Olds' yellow trunk. Sparkling wine, or as he calls it, champagne, is part of his grand theory of life. If you only drink champagne, he has claimed repeatedly, you can't be an alcoholic. It's not a very good theory, and it certainly hasn't worked for him.

He opens the champagne, sending the plastic cork skittering across the road, and passes me the bottle.

I was in law school, the Poet Shelley says. And you know what? He asks.

What, I ask.

I hated it, he says, absolutely hated it. It made me want to die.

What did you do? I say.

Well, I graduated and passed the bar and whatnot, he says, but that's not the point.

Well, I ask, what is your point.

Oh, he says, suddenly remembering. I was young, much younger than now.

This is a lie. He is maybe 27 years old-roughly 10 years younger than Bryon. If the Poet Shelley really did graduate from law school, it couldn't have been more than three or four years ago at the very most.

I was living with this woman, he says, a psychotic black-haired bitch, the kind who is so crazy that she feels compelled, strangely compelled as it were, to dye her hair red-and not a shocking red, a bus red, a lipstick red, but a real red, an auburn, a color that one that could plausibly find on a real person's head-and I remember that there was a phone bill.

A god damn phone bill, he says, in all likelihood a substantial one, but I had the money in the bank. In the bank. I had a check. And not just any check. It was made out to the phone company. It was even in an envelope, for Christ's sake. Complete with a stamp. And it sat there on my desk, until the phone company cut us off. Just like that, disconnected.

The Poet Shelley waves his hand with a dismissive flourish.

But that takes months, I say.

Three or four by my counting, he says.

But, I say.

Well, regardless of how it happened, he says, it didn't get paid. I have no rational explanation. It was just one of those things.

Go on, I say.

So I get home, he says, and I walk into the living room, and she's sitting at the table. We used a round folding wooden picnic table as a dining room table-just a little one-it even had a hole in the middle for an umbrella... although she vetoed that idea before it even occurred to me.

Anyhow, he says, she was sitting at that little table, drumming her nails. Cheaply-painted nails. A dark bronze-chipped around the edges, each nail a different length. And she was irate.

He takes a long, long drink and passes me the bottle.

Irate, he says, and then he abruptly shuts up, and points across the road.

There is a deer.

It is across the road, edging its way through the dense woods, slowly making its way down the short hill.

Shhhh, he motions, and together, we watch the deer for five minutes, as it prowls around the roadside. The Poet Shelley can't his eyes away.

Look at that, he says, finally speaking.

Odocoileus virginianus, I say, a white-tailed deer. A buck. At least two years old.

You're missing the point entirely, he says, it's eating the leftover leaves from this spring's crop of tulips. Those ones were red and yellow, and now, they're being eaten by a deer. In the tree behind him is a cardinal.

Deer is good, I say. And at this point, I'm considering reaching through the absent rear window to retrieve the rifle from the back seat.

You are a philistine and you're not eating this deer, he says, so you can get that out of your head right away. This deer, old boy, is a cultured individual, surviving the end of the world on a diet of ornamental flowers. Sleeping, probably, in someone's carport next to a disused Lexus SUV.

I hand him the bottle.

He takes a drink and hands it back.

So she starts laying into me, he says. She starts accusing me of this and that. Spending money on a girlfriend. Drinking it. By god, she actually accuses me of drinking it. Drinking the phone bill. We need a phone, she's screaming. What if something should happen. What if there's an emergency. What if we need it. And she's not intoning these statements, dear boy, as interrogatives. She's not posing them as questions, Chetty, she's just shouting out the words as if she's been rehearsing them all day long.

The money, he says, was actually still in the account. Believe it or not, I'm a fairly frugal man. I don't just spend money like that-well except on long distance phone calls, that is.

He reaches for the bottle, and snorts as it bubbles down his throat. He passes it back to me.

So I lose my mind, he says. I glaze over. I'm looking around the room, and what do you think, Chetty, what do you think I should focus on? Wordsworth. The Lake Poet. There's a green-spined book of his foolish poetry on the bookshelf and I turn to her and say: over there, on our bookshelf, is a volume of Wordsworth's verse. The phone bill is immaterial. It's unimportant. In a hundred years' time, no one will give a toss about an unpaid phone bill, but Wordsworth, Wordsworth will still matter.

He looks at me, slightly fish-eyed.

Wordsworth of all people, he says, the foolish man should have had the decency to shoot himself after the first Prelude. Still, I said it to her, and what's more, I actually meant it.

I take a long, thoughtful drink.

I still mean it.

I take another drink.

I thought she was going to kill me, he says. I have never seen a human being get so angry. Most untoward. She was hysterical, called me every name in book. Livid. Enraged. If there had been a cooking knife handy, I'm sure she would have stabbed me in the face.

And again.

You know what, he says.

What, I say.

I almost wish the bitch had lived, he says. Just so I could say: I told you so.

---

It's a true story. The Dark Lady also appears in The Fear of Contagion where she is the Red Haired Woman--on the night that we met in Kirby's, she had dyed red hair--and in The Memoirs of a Supervillain where she is Paulette "Bella" Trix, the ex-girlfriend of the master of the house. Obviously, she appears in a number of poems in Sonnet Sequence, probably 50 or more, but these were mostly written as we were divorcing. The Dark Lady managed to totally kill off my writing for most of our marriage.

This poem, though, I wrote within weeks of meeting her. The idea of the moon being God's tattoo came from M.T. Fuller, a fine writer. You can buy his last book here.


270. The Ink Of God’s Tattoo:

This is one of those night
Things, written well before the world divided into
Those with snake-like heads and those
Without voices: numb gods
Whose shapeless bodies bobbed in
The primal rivers, and who were
Torn apart by every bony
Primitive fish that swam by
(More weasel-like than anything else). Before
Any of that stuff happened, the
Mighty one, the only one graced
With any words echoed forth the
Following prophecy (Night hammered endlessly into
The new planets, Existence paused, cocked
Its incredible head, and listened hard;
The mighty one had a
Considerable speech impediment). In retrospect it
Will be studied by fools only
And idiots, but study won’t stop
Anything, and petty sorrows will multiply
Slowly into life, which will wring
All but the most sterile visions
From the living, who will kill,
Surely, the world, and make a
Callow nowhere out of what should
Be precious and defined. [What made
You think I could reproduce the
Infinite Voice?]

This is a place where
Six cents will buy a better
Gallon of gas, half of what
Now passes for gum, or the
Very things that were once free.

These things and intersections I know,
Along with antiseptic, and the taste
Of blood leaving my mouth, three
Loose teeth, and a slow rise
From the concrete while trees collide
With the sky.

This is one of those night things,
Where expressions reign supreme,
And exchanges become devalued;
Passion and its ersatz brother are
Indistinguishable, and offer reproach to all.
We left the TV on, scurried to
The bedroom, you undressed, and I,
Out of politeness, rearranged the night table.
Slowly your hands crossed my
Chest, and my skin eased
Against yours; the roaches had
It good, amused themselves
With bloodied chicken paper and the
Stuff I scooped out of
The hollow that ran from open chicken
Ass to headless chicken neck.

This one of those night things,
With everything from romance to road kill;
The deer in the headlights
Became nondeer in less time
Than it took for the
Cruise control to adjust the acceleration.

This is one of those night
Things, with everyone from junkies to
Jesters, from those shapes fixed
In their chairs watching only
The flash of their TV screens,
To those shapes behind the
Glass being spewed out into the dark.

This is one of those night
Things, with everything from a
Jism lizard to a jism
Blizzard to a jism gizzard,
No truth to speak of, and a juvenile
Sense of humor.

This is one of those night
Things, and it’s not supposed to
Make sense.

Think about it.
It that is. Why it’s
Always an it once we
Learn that it can be so
Much more; it takes a
Little less time, granted, to
Say it, and it’s much
More polite, can be mistaken
For a myriad other its:
Pizza, popcorn, cola, a trip
Under night to purchase tampons
Or diapers or a frozen chicken
Treats, antifreeze, if that’s what’s
Wanted. Get it for me,
Will you.

What’s the point of
Narrative consistency: a slight pause,
Perhaps, between one’s maudlin act
And another’s outright despair,
The kind of grace achieved
Through a lifetime of skull-fucking
Everyone in your dreams—put
Them away, peel them into
Thin catalogues and sterile displays,
Intended, perhaps for no one’s eyes
In particular; the shark, after all,
Is just a big dumb fish
Whose eyes automatically roll when it
Bites down hard. [This an intellectual
Temper tantrum written across the sky.]

Have you ever been in a
Bar long after closing, say at
Four or five; it’s an odd
Wreckage in full light, broken glass,
Business cards, a few keys, coins
And condom wrappers. Rye is the
Appropriate drink, six fingers in a
Beer glass and the brightest table
In the house. It sounds so
Clichéd. Then, once in a while,
Say, when the telephone rings, your
Dog reminds you of what you
Really are and begins humping your
Leg; you wonder how many legs
You have rubbed against, but it
Never stays at that and all
Those stray parts enlarge into faces
Those who left and those who
Tried against all logic to stay,
Even after that night, say, when
Your attention was caught and a lover’s face
Disappeared into the great clouds
To the south west, and what
Should I have said? And would
It have mattered hard that all
I really wanted was the mere
Surety of another? What I wanted,
I suspect, is now unimportant. In
Such a readily written history, amendments are
Meaningless, excuses, even explanations carry no
Weight when compared to relentless past;
The carl spak oo thing but
He thoghte another.

If the road
Is straight from the church to
God, I recommend the Chablis road,
Which is always empty on a
Christmas night. Some traveler could feel
This way, some traveler could want
To find somewhere that is not
Home; then journey, but certainly not
To Herrikville, Lydgateville, Gowerton, or to
A host of other ill-conceived resorts
For the mind only, but go, instead, to
A valley close enough by all,
Claid in greine of mervelous bewtie,
Pleasant to look at, where competing
Gordian knots and gaping vaginas are
Seen for what they are, even
After the day’s eventual decay you
Need a map sometimes, when the
Months get pushed aside, undemanding as
To whether that pause which unfolds
World is ignored or whether within
Such silence we can hear the
Old god’s speech and life begins
Again elsewhere, the blackness left behind
Becoming a new night in a
Different land.

Is it dark yet?

KANSAS
It was late May in the year of our lord 1992, and although The Dark Lady was still five months away, my life couldn’t help but practice at being really screwed up.

My relationship with the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest had hit its hilarious nadir on my 26th birthday on May 8th—she crying on the sidewalk, surrounded by boxes and cartons, me giggling on the balcony, swishing back a blender of strawberry daiquiris—and I decided to pass the few months that I had remaining of my freedom by fiddling around with Lora, a strange girl and sad cougar I met in Kirby’s Beer Store in Wichita.

It’s almost like I knew that I would meet The Dark Lady special sooner or later. Indeed, when I finally hooked up with her on October 7, 1992, we were living together within two weeks, engaged within one month and were married on January 7, 1993. It was an easy enough date to remember—I had sat my MA viva precisely one year earlier.

I was knocking back beer in Kirby’s slowly getting quite drunk. All of a sudden, a fat, dead-eyed slut stumbled over to my table and said the immortal lines: “if you buy my friend a gimlet, she’ll sleep with you.”

Kirby’s was a spectacular dive bar, inhabited by thin leathermen, topless lesbians, the obviously unemployable, a few decrepit bikers, suicidal sculptresses and pathetic creative writing graduate students. I was one of the latter. The place was decorated with nicotine and squashed roaches, and illuminated by hundreds of Christmas lights.

The cheap beer, Milwaukee’s Best, was $3.00 a pitcher and the premium beverage, Budweiser, was $3.50—everyone drank Milwaukee’s Best. In the afternoons, a pitcher of beer was on the line for anyone who could answer the final jeopardy question before it was asked. Spiro Agnew—that marvelous anagram—won it for me once.

The jukebox played everything from Husker Du to Miles Davis and although it took six months, us regulars at Kirby’s even managed to save up enough donations to hire Yo La Tengo to play for us, but that is another story.

Obviously, I bought the gimlet.

A haggard 32, Lora was five foot two and had a highly artificial bob of blonde hair. She reeked of cigarettes and when I got to know her better, she complained bitterly of hemorrhoids but was incapable of resisting anal sex. She not only gave the world’s best blowjobs and swallowed every drop, but ranted and raved about her skills endlessly afterwards, as if she had just won the 4-H Blowjobbery Blue Ribbon in the Durham Fair. All of her petty faults were easily forgiven as she had an uncontestable claim to fame—and here is a life lesson with regard to poetry—she was the unwitting guardian of a truly prodigious clitoris, an inch long wrinkly and quite frightening marvel.

She had been married to a local newscaster who got sick and tired of her inability to do anything useful or productive with her life—and although the dumb bastard deserved some sort of beating for being utterly oblivious to her impressive anatomy, he sort of had a point: blowjobbery and alcoholism will only get a woman so far in life. His one insult past injury—if her reportage was to be believed, and there is no surety of that let me tell you—was that he used to watch baseball during sex. As staggeringly cavalier as it may seem when one considers the absolutely unique position of examining an inch long clitoris, but according to Lora, he routinely gave her the option of doggy style or her on top—but only if she crouched down some—to ensure easy television viewing. Of course, he was in the media, so his obsession may have been a professional obligation.

As far as I could tell, she didn’t even know she was all that special, but she might have been feigning ignorance. Popular rumor had it that she had fucked absolutely everyone in Wichita. There was even a trophy with her name on it behind the bar at Kirby’s—covered, no less, by a condom.

After I went to Lora’s place a few times and she went to my place a few times I broke it off. She had a young son and I just wasn’t interested in dealing with it. In retrospect, I didn’t treat her any better than anyone else ever had and if I was prone to getting those sorts of feelings of shame and regret, I’d probably still be feeling them now.

Lora left me an increasingly hysterical series of messages on my answering machine and I finally convinced my friend DC to call her up. She latched on to him until he got tired of her and that’s pretty much where her story ends. By this point in time, I had moved on with my life, gradually working at hitting a soulless bottom that would see me clear through to the next decade. I'm lying when I claim not to know her last name.


147. I Never Knew Her Last

Name or met her kid,
But I saw her place
Once or twice, and she
Had this nice short bell
Of bleached blonde hair. She
Was about five four, and
Had a clit as long
As the tip of my
Thumb, and I accidentally tore one
Of her gray body suits.
Then she began to leave me grim little
Notes tucked into the crotch
Of my door, so I
Passed her on to a
Friend, who fucked her for
A while, and who then avoided her until
She became just another fixture
At the bar again, and
I suppose I miss her
Because I feel sorry for her,
And sorry to her, and sorry for
Everything that I am and
Everything that I have ever done,
And because I’m not
Exactly sure that it wouldn’t
Help, I’ll say it again,
I’m sorry for everything, I’m
Sorry for everything.


148. I’m Sorry

This is where the gallows
Stood, I’m sorry that this
Ancient well is now quite
Dry, I’m sorry the sky
Has laid siege to the
Old spirits of the red
Dirt, I’m sorry about the
Shit for sale in each
Flea market, I’m sorry about
The hand-me-down morals
Of this vast godless place,
I’m sorry that the king
Of the black man has
One gold tooth and wars
With the King of the
White Man, who drives enormous
Cars past the unsmiling king
Of the red man, who hasn’t had
Anything to smile about
For an awfully long time indeed.


149. The Sedgewick County Museum Of Art Is

Nothing important, just so much
Lunch and money.

Two years ago, I saw it as
One more night in a
Foul little restroom, watching
The bugs cross the floor, while the donkey
Show girl stacked change, and
Dripped gray semen onto the
Warn wood floor.

I pissed on
Robert Indiana’s LO/VE, pissed
On that famous statue of the
Word LO/VE, then shook a horrid,
Hairy, little rat-like dick at invention,
Beauty, creation, then zipped myself
Up under the lights of
Three passing police helicopters.

They
Were concerned with
A burst of small arms fire,
Which left me well enough
Alone, though caught in one
Small private revolution.

Today I’d say I regret it, because
There’s nothing in the world
I don’t regret. I’m sorry.


150. So Come

On back my Lora with
The inch-long clit, I’m
Just itching to say I’m
Sorry!

HOW TO PICK UP LORA

I was in the UVic Graduate lounge with KRN and CP and CD and AM and LC and a bunch of other people--we were all flushed with the horrors of having completed the first term of an MA in English, having a few drinks after Herb Smith's infamous introduction to scholarly methods class.

I guess I should say something about Herb Smith.

As a young undergraduate student, I was once an English major. Herb tried to teach me first year literature, and I didn't get along particularly well with him, probably due to the fact that I was a first rate asshole back then. Of course, Herb wasn't helping things. One of our assignments was to analyze Shirley Jackson's short story, "the Lottery". We were supposed to look for symbolism and whatnot. Needless to say, a young, relatively cocky Alexi I. Amnirov did not do terribly well at the assignment. Matter of fact, my paper returned without any comments save the letter F and a drawing of Mickey Mouse. I made the mistake of putting up my hand and asking "well, how do YOU know what symbols mean what in this god damn story?" The answer was dismaying: "she's a friend of mine; I asked her." I changed majors to Creative Writing (actually changed an entire faculty, from Arts to Fine Arts).

As a side note, Jackson had been dead for many years by then, so the joke really was on me.

Anyhow, fast forwarding four years... after my BFA, I decided to do an MA in English. Of course, the bastards made me do a second BA, claiming that I didn't have all the required background in literature (asburd). I made a mockery of the second BA and rapidly became a young graduate student. Cocksuckers didn't let me finish it, and although I was only one course shy of a fresh degree, I was pushed into the graduate program (I had broken through the funding barrier, and if I had actually finished the degree, they would have had to have paid for all).

In the dreaded introduction to graduate studies course that all new students are forced to take, I came face to face with Herb Smith, the same jerk that gave me the F grade all those years ago. In the class--very theory driven, by the way--we were allowed--as a final project--to apply any 20th century critical or artistic interpretation to a given text. Nathaniel Hawthorn's "Rappaccini's Daughter". I, out of spite, chose DADA.

For my lecture, I showed up in deep sea diving gear (updated by wetsuit, BC, tank, knife, flippers and mask etc), I had a few dozen mandarin oranges, a few dozen cans of sardines, a connect the dots of a rhinocerous, and, a tape recording of me reading my lecture. For obvious reasons, I was incapable of human speech due to the regulator in my mouth. I did an interpretive flipper dance while the tape played.

To my utter astonishment, I watched as my horrified classmates sent up a blizzard of pencil dust as they scrambled to take fucking notes?! Notes?! What were those idiots thinking? I thought for sure that the entire episode would end in disaster, but... I got an A+ and that son of a bitch became one of my greatest champions in the year remaining before his retirement.

I actually have the lecture on video. It's still damn funny after all these years, and I have to say, that I captured the magic of DADA and surrealism pretty well.

For those who don't know the full story, I was replicating a lecture Dali once gave. Only difference is that he wore the old fashioned diving gear, and failed to provide himself with a source of air--he almost died before they smashed the helmet off his idiot head. Dali also, did not give his audience anything to hear. He simply lectured inside his diving helmet until he blacked out. When a shaken Dali finally got back to his feet, he was hailed as a triumphant god by the amazed crowd.

Long live the genius of Salvador Dali.

Anyhow, cut forward to the bar. We're all sitting around drinking, having a good time. I'm feeling all smart on account of my brilliant DADA lecture, and I find myself drawn to this one girl, Lora. She's short and blonde and thin. She has pale pale blue, almost grey eyes and white almost translucent skin. Almost unbelievably, she's flirting up a storm. One of my classmates, LC, suggested that I simply go home with Lora. So I did.

We were both pretty drunk. We poured ourselves into her little white convertible VW Rabbit, and drove off into the night. When we got to her place, she put on a pot of spaghetti--which she promptly forgot about--and stripped naked. She wouldn't let me take off my clothes, and instead writhed and wriggled about. Cool. I really started to like her a lot but she freaked me out when she claimed: "I've always wanted to feel a baby in my belly." At that point, I was all like... I've gots to go. So I left. Of course I regretted it.

The funny thing is that she later went on to teach at Camosun College--still does. I just looked at her picture. Older now, nowhere near as blonde. Different last name. I'd prefer to remember her as Lora.

The funnier thing is that I was going out with the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest at the time. I even tried to break up with her because I really wanted to see Lora again, but it didn't go anywhere, and I never found out why. I guess that's sort of pathetic. I phoned up the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest and showed her this poem. She never even realized that I'd written it about someone else.

She wasn't dumb. She just always lied about reading my poetry. Serves her right.


from 268. Northwest in the Cold Wind

Why couldn’t it have mattered?

5000 birds fell,
Descending then into the deserted square on their pale wings,
Landing then, still, on wire legs.
The stone saints sang and blessed them until the stone saints died.
By midnight jaguars and ocelots crept past the sentinels and the darkened sundials
And picked the bones.
Outside, the defaced walls broken bottles glittered in the sodium light.
The streets smelled of piss and vinegar.
Every car was a familiar icon from a half forgotten faith.
Unseen, I ran my hands over the gate,
All the time thinking:
The birds always die first.
The birds always die first.

Come home, she said,
Come home.
I would have shook out another cigarette,
Except I do not smoke.
I would have taken another drink,
Except I felt too ill.
I would have run away,
I should have run away,
I still might,
One day.
Before death and dawn,
Before winter and the hopeless lives of all saints,
Before willingness,
Largesse,
Unprivileged joy,
There will be chance again for subtle glory.
Let me tell you how it happened.

The city ached
And arched its twisted blacktop backbone.
Its streets were the thin legs of long extinct and bone fragile birds.
My hands were tangled in their pale wings,
Like a rat’s tail pulled between piano teeth.

If this seems more than a little disjointed, fine.
There is not much more quality time,
And let me tell you how it happened.

I am cold now,
But was once as hot as fire,
As hot as a painted tail,
As brands in the jail—
Crossed nails, white hot at my brow crying thief—
As seeds hung from a half eaten corpse.
I am cold now,
So cold.

Like belly stretched cats hunting moths we can never catch,
Like moths circling a light we can never touch,
We circled each other
And came together.

Hark, the pharmacist of Ampurdan seeking absolutely nothing!

Very well, be mute.
Look for your old rubbish in the casual ranting of idiots.
Search everywhere,
Under every rock regardless of color,
In every shadow regardless of hour.
Go ahead,
Stumble dumb over dry lake beds—
Calcite mountains stinging your bleeding feet—
Walk unimpeded through fragile experience.
Above you, the dry eyes of long dead birds drop in clear hail.
Beside you, your own grinning face and bloody teeth
Stare into infinite reflections and observations and summaries
And theorems and a lengthy list of notoriously unread periodicals publishing other idiots only,
And when you wake from that stunted dream
To find only loneliness in a basement office and basement life—
Pilloried under the purple shadows
And the heels of the vigorously undid—
Scream and scrape off your anachronistic edifice,
For there is much to atone for.
Awake
And whisper afresh in eye shining encroachment.
Avoid the broken glass,
Duck your head past the shit smeared walls and warped wooden door jambs,
Stare past the gutters and torn cigarette papers;
For we are only flesh
And there is much to atone for.

With my lips on your nipple how can I stop?

Beethoven is you.
Cat clawed curtains are you.
A two tone marble table resting on wrought iron is you.
Children bathing in Britain is you.
A massive painted claw foot bathtub
And a toilet that refuses to flush
Is you too.
Everything is you.

It would be nice to stop colliding,
Beach our keels on sandy shores,
Set up shop in a casual and harmless paradise for once
Disclaim all vice,
Get some meaningful advice
From someone other than
Fakirs,
Interesting queers, murderers, quack doctors,
And psychopaths of all untold description.

I remember everything so well.
It is all history.

Well to hell with history.
Society is anarchist,
Or anti Christ,
Or a million other things,
And all of them all at once,
Marching around the globe guns in hand,
Safety off and shells away,
Complete with the tattered flags of all dreams,
And raw materials enough for several nightmares.

You were so wet.

This is the gothic nightmare of ideal love:
You savor the moment
When in the darkness,
Under a gothic moon,
On a near cloudless gothic night,
In an attic,
Perched on the tipsy spire of a deserted church,
In a throbbing graveyard,
After a bloody and mouth hungry feast,
You feel your heart stop.
My subtle apologies but
Go fuck yourself.
Myriad stars above the loggia,
Two trestle nestled lovers
Comforting one another with tourist Italian
While outside Firenza swoons into the arms of David.
Go fuck yourself.
The pale timeless sky:
She stares into his eyes,
The silken lengths of her gown trailing
Off into the space of her longing,
Their lips come together…
Go fuck yourself.
There never was a more perfect love,
A love whose hands were more pure,
Whose ears were more clean.
Go fuck yourself.
Consummated perfection in the arms of…
Go fuck yourself.
The…
Go fuck yourself.

After all,
Esmerelda is only dust,
And her dust was only ink.

And let us face it,
The tender
And still possible forever
That somewhere,
Something
Is still worth fighting for
Or at least
Walking the streets for—
Head and shoulders leaned
Into dimly lit and dangerous passing cars,
Sucking innumerable cocks
For the lonesome reassurance
Of a tightly rolled twenty,
Stuck up one flared and red-eyed nostril—
Is shit.

What happened in the garden happened long ago.
The stone wall was battered down,
And its rubble is now a lost dream of Lora,
Lora who loved us all.

Come back, I said,
Come back, this time forever.
Stop seeing the world from the mouth of a sterile hell.
Let us go back again to the garden,
Back searching for purpose,
An expanse of infinite peace
Made finite for a moment
And noticed in the space between reality
And the delicate odor of your pale hair,
Whisper afresh the subtle,
The vague and inarticulate,
Mouth again the silent litany of pleasure,
Or just shut up
And let me tell you what happened.

Not me, holding open books of dead gibberish
Repeating those solemn and foolish words
That, blurring in the near eternal evening,
Closed your eyes.

Not words, forced words,
That drowned your heart and its eventually empty reign
In a saturated solution of chlorine, alcohol
And my father’s hardened arteries.

Not theories,
Whose legs parted your legs,
Whose insane, obvious and oblivious wanderings
Shook kerosene and fire from your hair and eyes
And sank into the void between furniture stores
And all night breakfast restaurants.

And not simply easy sonnets,
That hissed through all the poems of Propertius,
That slid through all the poems of Horace,
That slithered through all the poems of Ovid,
And ended up
Bleeding in the penultimate book of the Odyssey,
Their black skinned backs broken
At every single vertebra,

But everything,

Everything,

And then after sweet oranges,
After the proverbial toast and tea,
After every line of every poem—
And at least ten drinks—
We met,
And the gate, for a moment,
Was open.

We ran past the birds where they had fallen,
Chased away the jaguars and the ocelots,
Made a circle of the dry bones,
And when the door closed,
I stripped off my semen encrusted jeans
And lay down to dream
Again.

Discontinuity

LORA'S HUSBAND

Died of AIDS sometime in the late 1980s. The precise date is lost to me, but I think it was probably 1988, maybe December, or perhaps 1989 at the very latest. This was a relatively new thing for the west coast of Canada at the time, so his friends and relatives did not take the news very well. Matter of fact, most of them did not even know he was dying of AIDS until he was dead from it.

Lora's husband had been a bi-sexual sailor, and it was only through sheer luck that he did not infect his wife or their unborn child with the virus. Actually, by the time the child was born, the hospital had figured it all out, but AIDS was still unusual enough and frightening enough that Lora ended up being denied medical care for about 12 hours after giving birth.

Lora's husband died shortly after the child was born. Not that a death is ever a happy occasion, but it was made a little more sad by the circumstances. Of course I slept with Lora--I was dating the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest and cheating on her was an absolute joy. I started feeling guilty half way through the process, though, and chased her out with one excuse or another. In the process, she left one of her earrings behind.

Before it turned sour, Lora and I had some grand escape plan for after her husband's funeral. We were going to run off to Mexico--hence the allusion not only to a fine Van Halen song but also to Cabo San Lucas (in the extract from "Northwest in the Cold Wind").

I remember babysitting for Lora a few months later (I say in the poem that many years had passed, but they had not). Her eldest child said something about her father, as if she regularly spoke with him, so naturally I asked her where he was, expecting to get some childish concept of heaven in exchange. Instead, she pointed to the mantlepiece, where his ashes were stored in a pot next to a jar that allegedly held one of the Queen of England's turds (Lora's husband had fished it out of the Royal Yacht's bilges or some such nonsense when the Britannia was docked in Victoria's beautiful inner harbor).

The thing I will always remember about the funeral is that his extended care nurse took the opportunity to spill the beans about AIDS. I had been warned in advance and took the precaution of drinking about eight beer prior to taking the podium. The crowd in the chapel pretty much evaporated. The funeral was on the local navy base and no sailor wanted to be at the funeral of another sailor who died of AIDS--they were all mighty queer but hiding their queerness in a very deep, very dark closet. It was tasty, what happened to the general atmosphere in the chapel when the nurse said that the cause of death was not cancer but AIDS. If I remember correctly, and I might not, I think his family walked out.

With all of this going on, I read the Shelley extract. I think I did a good enough job of it--as I say in the poem, I watched the videotape later and it was almost an out of body experience. That part, at least, is real.

I guess the only other things of real note are the references to Brautigan and to Bodenheim. Bodenheim appears in The Fear of Contagion in the Greenwich Village chapter where Dylan Thomas wipes his face, and the revolver Brautigan used to kill himself appears in The Memoirs of a Supervillain. Everything is connected.

The red wine in "Cato's Dream" is from a charming estate in British Columbia. My buddy David and I bought a few cases when we visited our other fatmate Keri at her parent's house in Oliver. I wrote this poem, I think, on New Year's Day, 1990. David and Keri were home when I was busy trying to cheat on the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest with Lora, but were unable to stop me from going to bed with her.

I really do still have one of Lora's earrings, matter of fact, it is the photograph for this entry.


86. The Novena Of Failure:

And let them carve the remaining
Forest into pale, white teeth. Hold
Your palms out to be kissed,
Allow your lips to be
Kissed, burn
Your skin, burn your face until
Your ears are only holes, and when
The windows break, listen to them
Kill your respect for the
Past. Now stop, and tell the nihilistic they bore
You; their troubles unfold only for
Your arousal. Fail, and let
The embryo of your mother, whose
Eyes are no one’s eyes, stare
And go blind in dust.


98. Spring: One Night We Served Dinner,

But he ate little and had grown
Very thin. He excused himself early
In the evening, the air was
Thick with leaves, and along
The boulevards the trees held
Brittle branches close to the ground.


100. What Do You Tell The Child

When it has been six
Summers since her father met the
Sea as so many ashes, or
When she is ten, and wants to
Know about the pictures and absent
Visits to germ-free wards, and daddy’s
Long morphine sleeps (merely confused deliverance
From the feral nations which dissembled
Him like statistics or stitches incomplete).
Just say that in all chemicals
And all novels and every hidden
Diadem of every disease, lurks a
Cage which must be kissed by
The sea, which will forgive all.

What mythology would you use? Your husband,
Your gay husband is dead of AIDS and it is 1987;
I guess they know enough as it is. Back then, they
Pointed to the urn on the mantle and said:
That is where Daddy is. Gramma said heaven, but
Really he is just right there.

And I tried to have sex with Lora, maybe six months later,
But she left in tears.

In case you read this: I still have your earrings if you want them back.


127. Cato’s Dream

John Ball’s and Cato’s sons dying
Drunk at the edge of a
Field, mud in their hair, the
Words of their dead fathers’ emptied
Manuscripts and parchments and four and
Two bottles in the mud, red—
Always red wine rotting the scrolls.
The red wine—always red for
Dying drunk at the edge of
Some fair field.

John Ball’s and
Cato’s sons hours and hours before
Inside Ball’s old hall—pile that
It is. Cato’s son rising (shit,
And can you understand that?) found
Both fathers dead. Dead, Ball dead.
Dead, Cato dead, spread out all
Over the settee. Dead from liberty
And dead from punishment and dead,
Damn dead, from death itself; but
Today, now, the world has aged.
It’s a ruin, though not ivied,
Matted and massed together, but weeds,
Filth, burnt tires, car shells, glass,
Muddy plastic: no nightingales nest in
The splintered beams, but traffic noise
And, outside, around the oiled harbor slowly
People awake and go through their
Lives, and what else? But today
The world is agéd.
And with an accented ‘e’, the whole
Greek chorus marches up, right on
Up, pushing aside the boys—though
Garland brow’d they well may be.
The sons of illustrious men shoved
Aside as the whole Greek chorus
Marches on up chanting eos eos.
Eos eos they chant, these Greeks.

Unlimited powers allow actions diverse as
Birds. Powerful birds float wings spread
On the ashes of the waves
Crying to each other.

The ocean:
These are the bones that were
My mother’s arms. Rational materials: earth,
Black earth; the plough; muscles; sweat’s
Acrid stink; hands, callused and palm
Raw; the field. Some people say
Edge all the time without feeling
The shards, but many also tread
On them like the night; they
Say, I walked here alone, my
Father is sitting in the garden,
I’d like to bring him something.
Alone, they say, this is my
Breath, this is my spine.

Eos eos ohhhh.

John Ball’s and Cato’s sons
Bearing the illusion that mechanical life
Systems—complex forms for recirculating minerals
And hot gasses—pass for what
We call living creatures; but hear
Me, there are no programs for
Living things, no stripes, no secret
Signs. John ball’s and Cato’s sons
Cry out that temptation will triumph vainly—
Although there are trees, alone and
Moss covered, although there is salal and many
Birds. It’s too late for escape.
Cato’s son removes his father’s voiceless
Knife, puts down a book and
Waits for temptation’s many words.

Vancouver
Is a driving city, for drivers,
Dangerous nodding groggy morons tearing themselves
Into strips of sleepy smoking air, it
Rains there, people should know the
Rain, for no amount of breath
Ultimately prevents drowning. I’ve tried to
Stay away, I’ve tried to stay
Awake, o eos, but I can see
The headlights coming.

One sip of
Lukewarm tea—not too milky—and
The Greeks vanish popping all the
Way back to Plato, adding revisions
As they go. O look here,
Aristotle, you have ground me small
And fixed my words meaningless. You
Have ground me small small small,
And you shall pay for all.
I greet you and wish you
To understand now, amen for charity,
Amen and no more.

Therefore, as
We have said, he was hanged,
Drawn and beheaded at St. Albans
On July 15 in the
King’s presence, and the quarters of
His corpse were sent to four
Cities in the kingdom. Knows
No one as I who is
Worthy. The most needy are our
Neighbors like prisoners in pits: these
Poor women charged with children and
A lord’s rent, these women—all
Souls—pity them and the money
We so suffer.

And the whole
Greek chorus clambers back in, hacking
Back their lines between long drags
On American cigarettes; smoking ruins their
Health they know, but they’re back
And they’re Greek and used to
Hardship. One starts to sing as
John ball’s and Cato’s sons crack
Open the first bottle and pour
Each out a glass.

John Ball’s and
Cato’s sons crack another bottle open.
John Ball’s and Cato’s
Sons can and do ponder
On their dead fathers’ dead eyes,
Drinking now to the dead, drinking
Now to the eyes of the
Dead. For these sons, o eos,
I was a stranger and yet
Taken in.

For as I was an hungered and ye
Gave me meat. I was thirsty
And ye gave me drink. I
Was a stranger and ye took
Me in: sans reproach, indeed nothing
Inside her soul to rail against,
Not the night, the night is
Not her fault, not sex that
Follows conversation, emptied drinks, cigarettes sucked
Ash ended to the very coals
Which stick on hardened fingertips. I
Was a stranger and you took
Me in. Tonight, o eos, the
World has aged.

Muscles shaking, red knees
Rug burnt: she holds a towel
Between her legs, pushing, expelling. Her stomach
Is not as firm as it
Once was, her palms and alcohol
Scented sour breath, sagging breasts, but
These words betray truth: naked and
Ye clothed me, I was sick
And ye visited me, I was
In prison and yet ye came
To me.

Earth, black earth and the seeds and leaves
Of plants, their humidity in the
Summer, then fall’s crispness, aging, rotting
Again into earth, black earth and
The wrackful siege of battering days
Lingers on. I will never forget
The beauty of this land. The
Path, o eos, twisted and clay
Banked roots, rocks and upward forced
Knee high stumps. We walked, slack
Jointed, down and happy until we
Heard the cry of the earth,
And felt with our faces the
Hot breath of our kind.
John Ball’s and Cato’s
Sons dying drunk at the edge
Of some field, tired from thirst
And the final death of their
Dead fathers’ dead words. John Ball’s
And Cato’s sons dying drunk at
The edge of the field, too
Tired to try even one more
Time.


from 268. Northwest in the Cold Wind

[You learn a lot of things standing in a church,
Slightly drunk, well, very drunk,
Burying someone you do not know,
And if it is a navy chapel, which this one is,
You learn that they hang banners from the ceiling—
The butt ends of long rusted ships
Audibly tattering like the fraying lips
On a face full of long dead teeth—
And no one sits up front,
But if you are reading something,
Or just saying something,
Everyone listens
Like they are used to doing that sort of thing,
So you slowly let the world drown
Itself within yourself
Until from somewhere inside
You hear a chief petty officer say:
I wish more of the men would have showed up
I guess it would have been different if he had died pure.
And poor Hitler
Begins retching into the shredded memos of yesterday.
Mea culpa, he cries like a good Nazi,
Mea culpa, mea culpa,
But not sorry.
He wipes his chin,
Grins every so slightly,
Pulls up a chair, smoothes down his falling hair,
For emphasis he puts his hand on your arm
And says:
In the morning,
We boarded the boat for Markham,
And heaved across the Zuider Zee in fifteen minutes,
Then stood around in the thick Dutch mud,
Chatting to fishermen in black caps,
Then we were shown some blue china
By a woman whose arms were as thick as ten wheels of gouda.
She told me find a nice girl,
Make lots of babies,
And go fishing too.
The sea is good for you.
The watery part of the world, yes,
Belted round by wharves
As Indian isles by coral reefs.
But you had not been listening
Because in your mind you were still there,
Still trapped beside Birkenau in the still Polish air,
Eating too much cheese,
Thinking about yesterday,
And you realize someone has been leading you astray
Through one
And into another shapeless day
Because you are rocking back and forth
All alone,
Staring into a bar mirror like a drunken parakeet,
Crying softly,
Crying softly, saying:
Hugh,
The day you died,
I hallucinated wildly,
And thought about tit fucking your wife
Between the breaking waves on the banks of the Weichsel,
And she would have gone for it too,
I think.
Then Hitler returns.
Holding your hand as you walk through the deserted buildings,
The long sterilized buildings
Where recorded voices cry:
Come dance with us.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your glasses.
And suddenly,
You are relearning how to relax,
So you start packing your bags for Mexico,
Start humming familiar songs:
The Cape of Saint Lucas you have to see it.
And there is Hitler again
With that mischievous little Mein Kampf grin.
He opens up an old portfolio—
Kept from his Vienna days—
Runs his hand along the soft leather.
He sits down sits right down beside you,
And starts showing you his watercolors.
Check them out Frank, he says,
Momentarily forgetting your name,
And flips to the first.

The first was of Richard Brautigan,
Caught forever in a small cabin
In California.
Blew his head off, says Hitler,
Tapping his own forehead.
The body was not found for some weeks.
His friends had been worried he had been depressed.
Then you remember that in high school,
Or junior high,
Or college,
Or sometime in between your birth and eventual death,
You had read a few books by this man,
This body, this empty case,
So during the long drive through Big Sur under the California sun
You pull over into a small park,
But the sky clouds over
And then it begins to rain.
You walk along the banks of a small stream staring at fish
Who swim into the sugar bowl of death.
You eat sandwiches and drink iced tea.
The rain stops.
You start feeling pretty good again
Remembering the good things,
But Hitler interrupts.
Failure, he says, is never forgivable,
And effort never rewarded is pointless.
And you want to slap him for saying that,
But Hitler is smiling again,
And he flips to the second painting.

The second is of a mad man in a mad hell,
Holding his own head lantern like,
Gibbering wildly, sorting mail,
Waiting for every yellow light,
Washing dishes—
His arms to the shoulder very wet indeed—
Crying wildly.
Poor mad Desnos, says Hitler,
Trapped in hell for eternity, tittering in hell for eternity.
He gave up too you see.
And you try to confront Hitler,
Try to tell him that Desnos was no fiction,
That Desnos is still alive,
Guarding the Pont de Neuf,
Marching ceaselessly from Fresnes
To Compaiegne, to Buchenwald,
To Terezine.
You try to tell Hitler that Desnos’ words
Can be found on lamp shades,
And bookends,
And in the very words of books,
And Hitler starts to laugh and tells you:
Lamp shades were always such a minor concern,
Gold was the true commodity.
And back at Birkenau a voice cries:
Open wide.
And suddenly you are in the chair,
Hands hold your jaws apart, place a mirror just so.
You look and see
That your mouth is full of the bloody stumps of all sorts of lives,
But in the spirit of goodwill,
Just before you feel your last crown snap off,
The fuehrer mixes you a drink,
Passes you a worn straw hat,
And fresh film for the Kodak.
Then he unbinds Desnos,
Lets him show you around Birkenau.
I am tired, Desnos says,
And the sun is very hot.
And in fact he says this so many times you grow quite tired yourself,
And forget that Desnos never said any such thing.
You begin to dream.
It snowed the day the train left for the mountains,
Elk, their white breath too white against the night,
Bored you,
Made you feel each passing second
Like an hour spent on the Pont au Change,
Waiting for France to find itself,
And suddenly you are back.
This, says Desnos,
Is where the sonderkomandos finished their final errands.
And he points to somewhere you cannot focus on,
And then the train leaves,
And you see someone waving a handkerchief as the painting around you swirls.
Wait, wait, wait, you cry, but no one waits.
Where is this one going, someone asks,
And you try to read the address but it is no longer a letter
But a telephone and the line is busy.
Finally it rings and you hear the voice of Hitler:
This is the third painting.

His third canvas has New York in a haze
In the early days of 1954,
Or at least that is what herr Hitler says,
Although neither of you have been there.
There is a long shadow in the painting,
And the years spin back and forth wildly
Because by now you are very tired.
I just killed two commies, someone says,
And leads you into a dim tenement
To see the bodies of two old people,
One of them clutching
A ragged sheaf of empty verse.
One of them,
Although blood covered,
Is still quite pretty,
So you pull up close.
Maxwell, she moans, you did succeed.
And suddenly it is all romance and brilliance
And roughly 1915,
And you are walking the city with Maxwell Bodenheim,
Selling poems by the bowery,
Brilliant poems and plays which your friends publish
And novels too,
Novels which never make you any money,
But in all reality you are a commie,
So you do not mind being broke.
And Maxwell takes you by your arm,
Which is like the arm of a child
Lifting shining lilies from a little brown pond.
Frank, he says, momentarily forgetting your name,
You must have integrity; never sell out
No matter how hard it gets. Never sell out.
And Hitler starts the projector,
And you watch the shades enlarge into people,
And there is Maxwell begging on the street,
Gutter bound and eventually dead—
Now much forgotten.
Between you and I, Hitler says,
Slightly misty eyed, I agree.
Never sell out,
But it helps if you have talent.
So with a tiny hiss of displaced air
Herr Hitler disappears,
And you forget about his paintings.

Then all at once and for ever it is over.
The chapel, such as it is, clears of the uniforms
And the trappings of all things. Ashes
Are split, half buried, half let back into the sea.
Hugh’s wife runs her hands across your spine,
Opens another bottle,
Leads you away and all things become indistinct.
Then you start to forget, until one day,
When you can no longer remember the scent of her hair,
The feel of her breasts the taste of her skin,
Or the sound of his voice,
You find a video,
In which a man who looks much like you,
And who is you, raises his head and says:
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius. Heartless things
Are done and said I’ the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,
Lifts still its solemn voice:—but thou art fled—
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes
That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm’s outrage, let no tear
Be shed—not even in thought. Nor, when those hues
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,
Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting’s woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,
And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquility,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as]

In April of 1982, we drove past Dachau in the afternoon.

NO REFILLS

Vicodin. I fell and went boom, slipping like a spaz on black ice in the train station's parking lot. Hours later, I left the emergency room armored by a thick fuzz of opiates and agony. Now, I just worry about running out. This poem has nothing to do with Lora, although she is a vegetarian.


Hopeless tourniquets of venipunctural roughage,

outrageous salads, a jumble of shoulder
injuries and boston lettuce affixed
eighteenth-centurywise in a creaking
trip past the land of lemons and into
the land of limes--more than a dressing quest,
a full on Coleridgian hunt for
a spectacular snack, a floppy green
oyster to shuck and finger fuck as the bowl tum-

bles down: this is a sinking wooden boat
full of outraged Hawaiians and not enough
Captain Cook to go around. Yes, dammit, we will
Watch the transit, but only after we eat
our greens--fuckit, it's all renal failure and loose

fingernails. Nothing stinks quite like the sea.

SCREEN LADY 2
After Lora unceremoniously dumped me for her environmental studies professor. This sawn off little asshole, by the way, is still only an assistant professor after 19 years. Anyhow, not being able to tolerate my own company in any sort of meaningful way, I had to find a new girlfriend. There were two contenders, both of whom would have done just fine. Unfortunately, in my feeble ploy to get to SL2 through her best friend, I accidentally ended up dating the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest for three wretched years.

This particular poem is about SL2

SL2, real name Yvette Brend, grew up to be a relatively famous Canadian broadcast journalist for the CBC. I won't post her picture here--she's easy enough to find online. I never actually told her about my feelings for her. We used to flirt in Patrick Grant's Shakespeare class and my Shakespeare text--which I still use--is covered with her handwritten notes, many of which are slightly dirty.

The poem is interesting to me, not for anything it really shows as far as my skills go, but because it marked the first time that I had deliberately alluded to the Vita Nuova. Any allusion prior to this poem--and remember that the numbering system has nothing to do with the date of composition--is accidental or perhaps archetypal.



72. Interrogation:

SL1,
Highly aware of her own specific
Charms, told the DA
That she wasn’t wearing pants.
Correctly, the DA assumed her underwear, pubic
Hair, and proximity of the phone
To her miscellaneous parts, was unimportant,
And, to the situation at hand,
Irrelevant. Needless to say, it is
Documented here not for posterity or
For titillation, but for stark narrative
Accuracy without showing any external emotion
Or indeed excitement. The DA continued, as
Always, with the truth. The text
Of one conversation is provided below
For reference's sake:

DA: I do
Kind of like her, you know.
She's awfully nice, friendly, and, well,
Awfully nice.

SL1: Would you like
Me to say anything to her?

DA: Uh, no.

Here a description of SL1
And SL2 are most likely required:

SL1, although suffering mild consumption, was as
Pretty and friendly as an
Open balcony in Florence in March, but
Was not really the DA in
Question's sort of girl, whereas SL2 was
More to the DA in question's
Liking, but her emotional conveyance was
Sketchy and the DA had no desire,
Well, yes, desire, but not the requisite courage
To risk destroying a sincere friendship
For the humiliated prospect of love
Or at least a dinner date
Or two. SL2 was less than
The DA’s height which was fine and
Good because the DA was not that
Tall. She had blue eyes and blonde hair,
And the DA remembered all too well the
Blue mascara that clung
Precariously to her lashes.

One March,
The DA and SL2 drank coffee together,
Then the DA called SL2 on the telephone
Afterwards, and not infrequently, for a while.
The DA stopped doing that,
Stopped calling SL2, just to see
If she was interested in at
Least talking to him. She did, in fact,
Call back occasionally so the DA’s hopes
Were kept afloat. The DA was rather
Impatient, or so people liked telling
Him, and he probably should have
Given the entire episode more time.

SL1: Are you sure?

DA: Certainly not, I mean, certainly.

SL1: Oh, come on.

DA: Certainly not.

And so the conversation continued for some time until
It ended

I see and
Am seen by only eyes, no
Nails here, no fingers, no hands,
No wrists, arms, or shoulders, no
Trunk with its organs, its guts,
No bile, no blood, no urine,
Only eyes and eyes fearing blindness
At that.

Blindness rummages absentmindedly through
A spectaclar collection of torniquets,
Turning on itself with a handful of needles
But irredeemably stuck
In the consideration of trivial things.

I’d like to talk to her. I’ll
Let the phone ring three times.
If she hasn't answered it by
Then, she's not home. I wouldn't
Let it ring again because her
Answering machine would pick it up
And I’d have to leave a
Message; I wouldn't do that,
It would annoy her, I think.
I don't know, it's difficult sometimes,
It's always difficult.

Of course, it is twenty years later now,
So I am almost guaranteed she's not home.

The narrator, our DA,
Switches modes and becomes
More adventuresome,
Less staid. The next portion of
The text is presented as an
Unlineated limerick: SL2 was the girl
For him, but his chances were
Remarkably slim. He liked her eyes,
Her lips, her thighs, and he hoped
That she liked him. [This poem
Was originally written on a piece
Of drywall on an old walnut
Desk in a stucco encased house:
Four walls, one roof, a swimming
Pool, a copper beech, a fir, and
A concrete block deck on the
West coast of the continent of
North America. In this house,
A young lad, later the DA, was growing
Up, always, in the past, living
And living and reliving, in continuum,
The events of his life, the
Instances of his upbringing and growth
To adulthood: the dead orange cat on
The striped sofa, the staple marks
On the bedroom wall, the waterbed
Creaking under the sexual strain of
Summer days and absent parents, the
Alcohol, drugs and egocentric musings of
The DA's overactive imagination, not to mention
The disappointment, crushed mind set,
Wanderings, and nightmares of all
Things bloody and broken up into.]

Now a speedy interpretation of the DA's
Feelings on other things. The DA
Had to watch what he thought
At all times, he couldn't let
His fantasies about SL1 or
SL2 get too intense, he couldn't
Stop to think about any of
His other relationships—either it was
Too dangerous (the DA was usually manageable
With the right combination of drugs
And television; he was well insulated
From the stress, bitter disappointment and
The horrifying what-have-yous that filled his life)
Or, facing the window where the seagulls
Always cried, he reached slowly out
To touch and found nothing.

But what could the DA do? He
Knew the things he liked to see:
The cotton curve of her sweaters,
Lilac, blue, pink, even the red
Of the uniform she wears when
He saw her on Thursdays. Those
Thoughts he entertained, but never really
Thought too hard about, realizing what
Unfolding would have to and needed
Must go on, and on the
White pants, their cuffs tucked carefully
Into white cotton socks, her hands,
Nails, the arc of her neck
As it moved into her hair
Still blonde from last year's sun.

The DA understood that he never
Gave it a chance, that he pushed
Things too hard. One day SL1 stopped
Calling him, and he stopped
Calling her and that was that.

I NEVER TOLD HER HOW I FELT
I first met my friend Lora in 1984 or so. I was 18 at the time and she was a couple of years younger, all legs and elbows, and stuffed into a skirt that was much too old for her--she looked at least 21. She stumbled up my front stairs, half crocked on cheap tequila. Lora was dating my friend Brad at the time. He was a big bleach blonde college boy--who at the time looked like a gay for pay porn star--in retrospect, their relationship was a little on the creepy side as she was only 16. Brad's father was a prominent cardiologist, so I guess the family's sheen of wealth kept everything cool; normal rules don't apply to rich people.

I think that I fell in love with her at that time and part of me will always love her.

She had to face a few demons along the way. When she was about 19 or so, she got into a pretty bad drunk driving accident and smasher out her beautiful smile (she hit the steering column of her sports car and it punched out a perfectly round, golf-ball sized hole in her smile--really the most amazing thing). I went to visit her in the hospital and was almost sick. The force of the impact had not only broken all the orbital bones around one of her eye sockets, but had exploded a can of hairspray. She wasn't burned by it as it never ignited, but her hair was this giant helmet of blood and hairspray. She begged the doctors not to shave it all off. The police never charged her with anything, as they felt that she had learned her lesson. The accident took out the island's only sand truck, so the next few winters were icy indeed.

For me to see her in a hospital was a tremendous statement. I hate hospitals and do not do well in them. I haven't seen a doctor for years and am the sort of person who would decline treatment even for readily curable but fatal illnesses. DNR.

To give you some idea how stupid poets are, the comment about the "wooden" man is from Lora's old boyfriend, Warren. Warren went with Lora and her parents on a Mexican cruise. To keep things on the up and up, Warren bunked down with Lora's father, and Lora bunked down with her mother. Warren wouldn't let Lora kiss him before bed because he didn't want to climb into the sack with a "woody". Lora thought this was damn funny, but ended up with pink eye anyway after Warren accidently shot one off at an inopportune time.

Lora ended up dating my friend David--he didn't treat her very nicely. There was some incredible sadness in her life. I don't quite know what it is, or rather I do, but it's too unspeakable to consider. She enjoyed swimming but it made her back too big.

Lora studied art history and eventually did very well for herself. She was and still in incredibly beautiful. Although I was drunk or high most of the time, I don't think we've even as much as kissed each other on the cheek.


255. Chaucer’s Take On Lora:

Fair was this young wife and therewithal
As any wezele her body gent and small
A ceynt she werede barred al of silk
A barmclooth as whit as morne milk
Upon hir lendes ful of many a goore
Whit was hir smok and broyden al bifoore
And eek bihynde on hir coler aboute
Of col clak silk withinne and eek withoute
The tapes of hir white woluper
Were of the same suyte of hir coler
Hir filet brood of silk and set ful hye
And sikerly she hadde a lickerous ye
Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two
And tho were bent and blake as any sloo
She was ful moore blisful on to see
Than is the newe pere-jonette tree
And softer than the wolle is of a wether
And by hir girdell heeng a purs of lether
Tasseled with silk and perled with latoun
In al this world to seken up and doun
There nys no man so wys that koude thenche
So gay a popelote or swich a wenche
Ful brigher was the shynyng of hir hewe
Than in the tour the noble yforged newe
But of hir song it was as loude and yerne
As any swalwe sittynge on a berne
Therto she koude skippe and make game
As any kyde or calf folwynge his dame
Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth
Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth
Wynsynge she was as is a joly colt
Long as a mast and upright as a bolt
A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler
As brood as is the boos of a bokeler
Hir shoes were laced on hir leeges hye
She was a prymerole a piggesnye
For any lord to leggen in his bedde
Or yet for any good yeman to wedde


256. Similitude:

This is an insult to iron
In an action as quaint as
One lover trapped in the amber
Of an unrealized photograph, one lover
Who now spends all night alone:
All of this from a shutting
Door, after days, after weeks, after
Vital hours spent with tired legions
Of abrasive visions and drunk delusions
Of hope, or a type of hope, which itself is always
Worthy of love, but which always must be
Ultimately without love, or the
Semblance of love.


257. The Drive Home:

You, your one clear eye,
Your bloodied broken teeth:
The steering column
Smashed you, took your jaw
Out of its sockets, broke
Your face, shattered the bones around
Your right eye, and numbed
All the nerves in your right leg.

I waited in your hospital room until
The gravel was covered by grass,
Waited until the asphalt buckled
And the steel rusted and was gone,
I waited until all your needs were met
Then lost forgotten,
And though I’ve often wondered why,
You simply said the road drifted away
And then sudden light and sleep turned
Into something more insubstantial.

From the perspective of a hospital room, the past
Is always abstracted and dimmed,
But someone
Must have turned you over,
Someone must have held you
And lifted you and carried you
So carefully and with so much love,
After wiping the blood
From your face.



Lora always claimed that her favorite picture in the whole world was Paul Klee's "The Twittering Machine". I rather liked Kandinsky at the time and eventually put his image "The Waterfall" into chapter three of The Fear of Contagion, a book that will probably never get fully published. If you look very carefully at "The Waterfall," you can just barely make out the two figures on the right hand side, near the top of the painting. Cap'n Happy and the shade of Guido Degli Anastagi are enjoying a picnic, and are eating egg salad sandwiches. Here's the painting for you to enjoy:



Anyhow, back to Lora... in this poem, I changed her undergraduate university to Emerson and her drink of choice to French coffee. The leopards were put there in honor of Derk Wynand, who first told me to read Pablo Neruda. My love poems--which I guess means all of my poems--owe a tremendous debt to Neruda.

258. The Bright-Hued Fish Of Tropical Seas

Sink low in the waves and
Freeze beneath the green-eyed shapes that haunt
You and hunt you in the
Night you created. Because It was night, Lora,
Ocean dark and jungle dark,
And when he closed the door,
You saw leopards and thought of
Glasses, and a concrete wedge of
Breath was driven in between newspapers
And morning coffee: French coffee before
Classes. At Emerson, you
Watched the models stretch their thin legs
Into wooden brushes, into steel brushes,
Into soft copper chisels and warm
Marble, and the marble itself melted
Into the history you now know so
Well. Kandinsky upsets you, from
His shining paper prison, as if
From hell, you see his terrible
Hand, see how he glares, and how
His twitters have become dirges, wound
From barbed-wire birds, night tropical
And dark, with leopards resting in
Matted twisted branches and no moonlight
Upon the streams.


259. Ancient History:

Years ago and in another’s arms content
But not free, entirely, youth
And ambition, savage and leopard-strong, drove
You into a darkness which was
Not darkness, but the first reluctant
Breaths of self. Your self can
Only be loved by those who
Know you, not by the wooden
Man whose ashes you burnt, whose
Ashes you spread across your body,
Whose splinters you still find in
Your delicate hands, but that was
Long ago, and it failed, and he was
Followed by another, who in
Happiness, who in gentle development, who
In care, who in love, who
You believed, however wrongly, completely in,
Took you hard, then diverged in
A rapid action as mechanical as
Rail cars in Calgary and as
Faultless as acid reacting to the
Valences of emotion. Your lover’s words
Went with the melting winter, but
Briefly his history and yours converged,
So unfortunately as to exclude all
But art in love and simple
Engineering.
O the problems of precision!


260. Statistics:

Only the weeks remain uncounted.
Your breasts, beautiful themselves, were caressed, and
The shapes of your hands were
Repeatedly compared; where are the leopards
And multihued fish now? I know,
Fully, that what you say to me,
How your longings are my longings, how
Your dreams are my wishes, are not small scratches
At a distant fabric. I hear
What you want and am horrified,
As horrified as an idol not worshipped
Is melted into the next pantheon.

The leopard can be seen behind
Dark bars, but the leopard’s breath is
Still breath. How you could
Endure such repetition, in a free
World, is beyond me, and your
Wish is just as brittle, for
When a thing becomes its plastic
Semblance, like a machine untroubled by
Spastic biology, the idle earth is
As bound as the heaven-trapped angels,
Who act their freedom in tiny
Revolutions around an unimpressed god.


261. Girlfriend, Girlfriend:

L’envoy
A mon amie, so feel, Lora,
Feel, and enjoy absence
While it hangs about your breasts
And caresses deeply with coldness.
Let it rip through the layers
Of education and esoterica which you,
Innocent and worthy, have built because
You could. Let it eat your
Soul like leopards descending, always, into
The unknowing forest below, and sing
And celebrate for you do feel
And are not iron.


262. Epilogue From Horace:

But now, even those strong years are gone
And although you held up,
You held out as well,
And so here we are,
Two middle aged pretenders,
Separated now by thick glasses
And a dizzying patchwork of scars and tattoos,
And yet somehow we remain coltish at heart,
Uncheckable, untamable, odd little weasels,
Swigging back bottles of tequila
And falling upstairs:
You were over dressed
When I first met you,
And your knees were skinned,
But life is easing its way toward pure memory
And shying away from experience.
Did you know that
I see my story in every version of yours,
That I see my regrets and my errors
And my bad judgment
And my losses
And my gains every time I think of you?
Do you know what love is, Lora,
Or self-actualization,
Or strength,
Or are these inadvertent lessons,
Ones from which one day we awake,
Fully formed,
And continue on our way without ever
Realizing what else we’ve learned?
What else indeed?

MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

I graduated high school in 1984. Mount Douglas High School in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

The place was a fairly typical, boring, uneventful grapefruit league hellhole. Full of the standard cliques and social groups that you can see in any large school. In this case, probably 1400 or so students in two grades (in Canada, at that time at least, high school was only grades 11 and 12, and junior high was 8, 9 and 10). Anyhow...

I hung out with the stoned kids who did well in shop class and smoked pot in my friend Dave's van. I hated the kids on the wrestling and volleyball teams (rah rah sis boom bah types, full of glee and school spirit), but on the whole I barely noticed anything around me. I was much more interested in smoking pot, drinking beer, and playing broom ball at Oak Bay Rec Centre on Friday nights (one day, I will write a poem about broom ball).

Anyhow, a few years ago, back in 2004, I got an email invitation to the 20th reunion. I was told that everyone had enjoyed my presence at the 10th reunion (an utter lie as I was living in Europe at the time), and that everyone was looking forward to seeing me again (they were not, as I was probably the biggest asshole in the school, although in my defence, I was quite funny, being the hilariously stoned class clown). Nevertheless, I found my own school yearbook and spent a few minutes reading the comments and captions. Everyone was so full of promise and life, so full of good will... and yet these same assholes were remorselessly bullying this kid in my class for being gay. Like I said, I was too interested in having a good time to care about it one way or another, and my lack of action or even outrage is a deep shame today.

This poor kid, Dave S., hung himself in the park a little after we graduated and his body was not found for some time. These feelings just sort of welled up in me when it came time for the reunion. I began thinking about everything else I ignored, and how mindless and stupid everyone's dreams were. Sure sure sure, I know it sounds gothy. Oooo I'm so edgy. But fuckit, I'm not 15 years old. Any sense of hatred towards these stupid cocktards is completely legitimate. Do people need to be reminded of the utter pointlessness of their lives? Sure they do.

In my role as self-appointed laureate for this group of fools--the same group of fools, mind you, who couldn't be convinced of the absolute critical necessity of publishing any of my acid poems--I decided to provide them with a public poem for the occasion of our graduation. They never replied to me.

Lora, as always appears. This time, I'm talking about Lora's ex-husband, the one who gave her the cherished lupine last name, and who really was an unemployed golfclub repairman. Jesus, that dude was such a mistake for her.

Although I sent my old classmates this poem, and suggested a myriad of ways they could use the text, they never wrote back to me. In case you're wondering, the magnificent breasts once belonged to Zanetta Z. Once, in chemistry class, she accused my friend Brent of staring at her chest. He replied that yes, in fact he had been staring at her chest, but I cannot remember what happened next.

My theory of poetics is simple. All poems should be about hate. It's the most powerful emotion we have and can drown out love in a micro-second. As the mythology would have it, it's hate all the way down. The poem's rhythm is partially lifted from the fight 50 tigers poem by Dr. Seuss (who I'm pretty sure lifted most of his rhytms from Eliot, eg One Fish Two Fish is uncannily similar to Prufrock on more than a few levels).


359. To The Graduating Class Of 1984:

Hey idiot jocks and other
Foyer dwelling ass kissers, geeks,
Dorks, drama fags, and all you kids who blended
In with the walls and halls so perfectly
That you were forgotten instantly
And didn't have to wait 20 years
For people to wonder
Who the fuck you were and ask you
What the fuck about something
You never saw because you never
Got invited or went to shit
Like that anyhow;
Hey graduates of 1984: tell me this,
How well did you do with your lives?

Hands up if you're not divorced
Or alone. Hands up if you
Wake up every day with anything
Other than dread and fear and the desire to
Take your own life.
A lot of us did, you know,
And I can't say I'm either
Surprised or impressed or maybe even a little depressed
That some or a lot or all of you or us did
Or wanted to, or needed to, or had to.
Personally, I wish most of you had, and it's not
Too late even now, so try try try. Do it now.

Better you than Hugh who wasn’t found for a month,
And who—you ignorant cunts—really was gay:
He was found on the bleak little hill
That named our school, the hill that was itself named
After the grandson of a slave girl,
North America’s first black governor.
Take notes: there’ll be a test on all of this sometime.
I think Hugh is going to miss it,
So we'll just mark him down as failed.

Poor Hugh, I would have liked it better if my memory
Of him had only been perfectly combed hair,
Sergio Valenti jeans and a life story that headed
Off to some other city and a quiet life I didn’t know.
Hands up if you at least tried to kill yourself.
Hands up if you're a little disappointed
That you didn't succeed.
Hands up if you think you deserve better than this.
Liars.
None of us deserve better than this.

Hands up if you fucked Lora in the eleventh grade.
Hands up if you’d still do it again, now,
After all these years:
You pedophile fuck.

Tell me, who made all the money?
Who accomplished all their
Serious goals? Who helped pave the way
For world peace?
Who brought water to the thirsty,
Or food to the hungry?
Who clothed the needy
Or visited the imprisoned?
Who ever bought any of that Christian bullshit?
Own up, because I’d like to kick you
In the nuts right now just for being
Stupid and superstitious
And asinine and all those other things you are
If you think that anything you do will ever
Make even a tiny difference to anyone anywhere
At any point in the world’s history from now
Until the end of time.

Own up, all of you:
Who managed to do anything other than lie
On your taxes, phone in sick to work and wish
To God that there was just one
More hour in the night for sleep?

Who had looks that decayed early?
Who married a man,
An unemployed golf club repairman to be precise,
Who beat them, cheated on them,
Left them early with a little baby,
Who left them and said "my life was wasted with you,
I never liked you, baby, and now, baby, we're through"?

Hands up if your magnificent breasts headed
Due south at 22 and now write to you yearly
From some cheap tropical beach where no one knows
Their real names and no one gives a shit if they drink
Too much and smoke too much and bite
Their nails even more than they used to.

Jesus, by now how many angry hands have touched you?

Hands up if you're taking Viagra?
Hands up, seriously now,
If there'd be any point to it even
If you were taking Viagra.
Hands up if you didn't have to beg
Your bored spouse for it at least once in the last year—
HA! Once in the last month! Once in the last week!
Hands up if your nuts are so desiccated they'd crumble
Into dust at the slightest touch.
Hands up if your boss kicked you in them anyway
Today, or put you down today, or dismissed
Your ideas today, or took you into his office today
And spoke at you today while you studied
The eighty four tiles in his ceiling today, and hoped
That your shaking chest wouldn't be seen
Today, that you could preserve something inside
That resembled at least internal dignity today or
Any other day or any day at all or ever.
How did that work out?
Hands up if you’re happy with your answer.
Me neither.

Hands up if perhaps you came to this event to get
A message from someone like me?
Maybe a message from me?
Sure, I might not
Have accomplished anything useful either,
But at least I always knew the deal was shitty.
I even remember telling you all that 20 years ago,
But did you listen? I didn’t think so,
So I’ll tell you it all again.

Feel free to print this advice on commemorative tote
Bags or t-shirts or place mats.

We are the lost generation,
The unspectacular failures of the late 20th century;
Out in our little corner of the Pacific Northwest,
We huddled in the unceasing rain and covered
Our arms with meaningless tattoos and poked
Ragged holes into our noses and eyebrows
And lips and tongues and even into the heads
Of our now-useless dicks, and we kidded
Ourselves that we were hip,
Or that all those holes were about something,
Or meant something.
We wore a lot of plaid and thought that somehow helped.
We liked acid and mushrooms
And heroin and pot and glue and paint fumes and Sterno
And photocopier fluid and Varsol and shoe polish—and still do,
If the truth be told—and if we had any courage at all,
We’d still actually do those dangerous drugs,
Then at least we’d be doing something.

We didn’t have a war. Everyone promised us
Annihilation and filled our little noggins
With Day After Road Warrior Red Dawn wet dreams,
But when push came to shove,
No one got to wear leather pants,
Scrounge for ammo, or fight for food,
And crimped hair went out of style.
The old men in charge shelved the whole
Mess, everyone shook hands and we watched
As history passed us by.
We will never own our own homes.
We will never join the Elks.
We will never get a decent table anywhere,
Even if we book weeks in advance
And wear the right kind of glasses
And drive the right kind of car.
We have been forgotten and ignored
And I can't say we deserved any better.

Have fun re-living your glory days.
I wish I could have been here to wreck your party.

THE FIRST TIME I TRIED TO KILL MYSELF

This took place sometime in November in 1988. I might have been still living in my apartment with Lora (above the Paperbox Arcade on Johnson Street), but I might have just moved out. I remember going to one or two rental agencies, but I'm pretty sure I was still living with Lora when this happened. Yeah, I'm sure of it.

I'd better set the scene a little. I had been working as a student consultant for Apple Computers as part of their Apple Research Partnership Program. The job provided me with a free trip to Apple's Canadian HQ (just outside of Toronto, in Markham, I think) and a free Mac SE-30. In exchange, I had to help university faculty with whatever they wanted. When I went on the training trip, I got it into my head to start the process of shopping for wedding bands. Luckily, I didn't spend any money, because when I got back to Victoria, she told me that she wasn't sure that she wanted to get married anymore.

I could read the writing on the wall as well as anyone. As soon as someone tells you that they don't want to marry you anymore, it actually means that they have moved you into the "mistake" column of their life's balance sheet.

Obviously, the right thing to do was to kill myself with sleeping pills. It never really got that far. I tried to purchase a bunch of pills but my credit was so wretched that each one of my cards was declined. One after another. In retrospect it was really funny. I had this massive number of boxes of over the counter sleeping pills--I was going to try to eat double the LD-50 of diphenhydramine which is about 500 mg/kg at least in rats. That meant... ummm about 1000, 40-mg pills. That's a hell of a lot of sleeping pills. It never would have worked. But it does make for a fine story.

Gio in the first poem is Glenn E. Howarth. I was taking drawing classes at the time. He's member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts. My Ontarian friend is Steven Heighton who is also from Kingston. The various poems take place mostly near 3100 Princess Street, which is where I lived until I was 7.


107. Tweed:

Last year
I went to Ontario. On the
Way from one big nowhere to
Another I stopped in Tweed, where
Security is brick and brownstone, and
Civic pride is painted fire plugs,
North America’s smallest jail house, shattered
Bedrock and cows. Tweed is a
Painting of autumnal trees wandering by
Lakes and brooks and more trees.
Gio, my painting instructor, would close
His eyes and say, use the back
Of the brush please, feel the
Branches, curl them away, the back
Of the brush now. But his life curled
Away itself and I’m now alone,
And unable to draw hands.


108. Tweed Is On The Edge Of

Crops of rock and death. The King of the White Man:
There's too much said already about
His fingers, his breath. I’ve tried
Coping with him in a reasonable
Way: pleased to meet you, sir,
Hope you like Tweed.
The King of the White Man, Tweed
Won't mind if you're not original
Stay a while, you're welcome here,
Take your black clothed body to
The restaurant, eat some eggs, they’re
Good for you, and watch the
Road kill wince the as last
Bus roars by. All of Toronto


109. Comes Here To Die. Kingston Is

Just another road kill, university, jail,
Small city, historic monument. I arrived
From the north, wheeling along mirror
Dead lakes and skeleton trees. Kingston
Took Sir John A. Macdonald's bones and
Hid them in the ground near
Maples and squirrels. Ten sections and
Four rows away are my grandparents.
I don't remember them, don't share
The same memories with my sister
Or brother or parents. I’ve heard
About grandpa’s cigarettes leaving grave tracks in
Ashes, and my mother measuring time to
Her mother's attacks of fear
And recollection. I’ve heard about the
Doors and machines and fences, the
Nights and nails, and the driveway
In winter. In the night near
Lake Huron you can hear the
Ghosts. One night I woke to
Claws and scrabbling. Flashlight in hand
I left the cabin, felt the leaves
And rocks. One crack and he
Was there. In the night near
Lake Huron you can see ghosts.
I traced my grandparents headstone with my
Hands, learned every letter, every chip


110. Every Crack. The Frontenac County Board

Of education hoards my childhood in
A wooden box between 1972's surplus
Science kits and two broken globes,
My illnesses, my absences and
Everyone I knew. Lora, the girl across
The street, died. My memory of her
Is a yellowed movie fifteen seconds
Long: a skipping rope is tied
To the garage door knob, the girl
Holds the end of the rope
And turns, the boy is clumsy
And keeps missing: one skip, two
Skip, one skip. In the
Afternoon I parked outside her parent's
House and watched. Across the road
Was my old house. I didn't
Leave my car, didn’t knock on
Their door. When I was four
My father pressed my right hand
In wet concrete, every day I
Saw the change in my hand
While the print remained the same.
I sat in my car, stared at her parent’s
House then drove away.
I remember, also, another memory:
Lora, the little girl who used to
Live beside me. I remember
Playing doctor with her.
We were two small
People without distrust or clothes, fiddling.
Us kids will deny doing that,
Even when caught pants down in
The weeds. She wore overalls and
I said I’ll show you mine
If you show me yours, and then
The movie becomes indistinct,
Less and less and less. I’m sorry
For fleeing across country, sorry
I’m parked in front of someone
Else’s home, but I’ll show you mine
If you show me yours. So


111. Adieu And Sorry And Truly Lora’s Home

Closed itself in a breath of
Old barbed wire and window frames.
Forced, she knew touch and violence, but
She lived,
And she kept living,
Although she was passed
Back and forth between child welfare,
Ruinous foster homes, state schools,
All four grandparents, and
Every single one of her mother’s sisters, and
She kept on living, and, one day, Lora
Grew up, moved to Toronto, and began
Dancing; the lights blistered her
Neon skin and she felt the chrome
And vinyl and plastic and leather
Of cheap stages, and felt the chrome
And the vinyl and the plastic and the leather
Of many car seats and gear shifts also,
And she felt many hands
And many different men,
And to her it was just like sunlight,
Or the sleet slinging out of the cold
Under lake-effect clouds,
It was just like Toronto in the snow,
Or Toronto, scorched, burning,
Stinking like singed cat fur,
It was like everything and everyone,
And she kept living;
She felt the skin on her hands burn,
Knew the feel of cigarette scarred oak
Stages, and chipped linoleum floors
Forced against her small perfect knees;
And one day, in Toronto, I saw
Her, saw her framed by the
Christmas flash click of lights and
Bar music, sprawled on a cold floor on
Cold thighs as she danced to
The subterranean howl of Bloor and
Yonge. I saw again after so many
Years of reliving weeds and overalls,
And being caught, pants down,
As children, so I raised my glass
And said: hey, Lora, I’ll be Daddy,
You be Mommy; let’s play house.


112. When I got back something

Had ended, but those things always do,
Don’t they? And, my Ontarian friend,
I know I shouldn’t say anything, I know that
God doesn’t want any more
Poems about death or loss of love, that
God really wants all the world’s
Angst ridden young men to quit
Their infernal bitching and grow up.
I tell you, my Ontarian friend, I know all
This stuff, but when I got back,
When I always get back,
All the words I read point to nowhere.


113. Those Broken Engagement Fired From Job

Terminal illness dead cat blues: and
I was hardly going to take
It any longer. Let's just
Talk about the weather; maybe I
Held a knife against my
Neck for hours, until sweating and
Angry I threw it away, maybe I
Stared out the window at
The distant traffic until I got bored,
Maybe I left my apartment
And watched the buses stalk the edges of
Dirty streets, maybe I walked into
Shoppers Drug Mart, and, beneath the
Fluorescent lights, picked up five
Packs of pills, Anacin, Bayer, Panadol
975 time release arthritis, red warning
Label stuff and yes
Two 40 mg Sleepeze D boxes of
25 and I got to the counter
And went to go
Out but checked out broke, and I
Pulled my pockets apart tried every
Piece of plastic at least five
Times, then put the pills back
Pack by pack. I’ll tell you,
My Ontarian friend, what God wants.
He wants all the world’s
Angst ridden young men
To get better credit.

And yet you do keep taking it. Keep letting it roll
In and under you, and you are still alone and many years
Have passed. You have been dead for so long.

MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRLFRIEND
Sometime in the spring of 1990, my best friend David began seeing a Hispanic girl named Lora. She was into Spanish dancing, had dark brown eyes, and an amazing body. She was also more than a little crazy. Her last boyfriend, for example, came home from cheating on her to face over 300 smashed compact discs and no wearable clothes.

Lora dated David for all of two months, and dumped him, basically because he was never sober around her. Sure he was sober during school hours, but as soon as the school week ended (Thursday or so), that was it. He was loaded. He let her down a bunch of times and eventually she got tired of it.

She was training to be some sort of real estate agent, so I suppose she’s probably wealthy by now. Probably married, and being crazy around someone else.

Although I was dating the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest at the time, I was doomed the second I saw Lora. At the time, I was following the advice of Derk Wynand and was reading nothing but Lora, Paz and Neruda.

I wrote a number of poems to Lora, but never told her how I felt.


37. He Was A Cripple:

A torn out stump of
Righteousness half lost to the
Great machine of the sea.
Anyway, after high school he became
A cook and hid from then on
In a dirty clam shack down by
The town beach, just sort of shuffled
In one day and began wearing
The old steam oven like some sort of
Unbelievable prosthesis—
All jangling and hissing, whose only
Purpose was to scare restless
Children back to their immaculate
New England prep schools.
From that point onwards,
It was just a matter of time—and years—sagacious
And slender—did indeed slink past—
But as he followed a thread
Of perfectly battered fish through some sort of
Half assed maze, he began to realize
That the hours themselves are eager
And that hard exile displeases the
Sea—oblique paths and a heavy horizon
Looms up like the sweet
Key to a disconsolate hue.
And so he began to slide
His words in halts and
Starts, forcing them to perfectly
Match the rhythm
Of clear clam chowder as he studied
Her, studied Lora in her tie-dyed shirt
Pouring heavy cups of burnt decaf
For no one she really liked.
And he was coming
To realize that he
Wanted her more
Than just about anything,
But in an academic sense,
Like she was an expensive postage stamp
Or the best snow tires ever.
Anyway, she always half knew that he was
Shitting her, and when
He said he wanted to take
Her to Mystic Seaport, show
Her the old boats, rusty spades and
Try pots and fuck her socks off in
Starbuck’s bed, she laughed like
Hell, and threw
A handful of Equal his way.
One day, she vanished like the wet kelp back
Into the furnace of the sea,
And he supposed he missed her.
The bull kelp, the mussels,
And the wandering wind:
It was all part of the same
Sweet, naked place, where explorers
Catalogue innumerable and forever-sized absences.
After his shift ended,
He used to smoke a cigarette
And watch the gulls,
Or talk to the old Chinese
Guy who fished at the end
Of the pier. He would walk down
The beach, and feel Lora walking beside him,
Feel her carried against him,
Feel her cast toward him.
But really, he was just kidding himself.
It was years ago, and she had just
Quit after the summer
Was over and went off to Bard.
And the King of the White Man said to me:
I never saw
Her again, but if I could, if Lora was
Here still, or here now, I would,
I would take her, I would
Rattle whatever cage she was in,
Bang against the bars, tease her,
Throw stones: anything to get a reaction:
Lora, if that was not enough,
I’d show you—cold, ruminating, desirous,
Captivating, and above all dirty,
Very dirty, Lora. When I was young, I was rash,
And I had no soul,
And I did not care about you,
I wanted to degrade you, turn your eyes
Into blank holes, broken windows in a justifiably
Condemned house, knead you into jelly, into weak
Pilings lashed by constant waves,
Lora, I would have consumed you,
And I swear to god, you would be better off
If I had.
Anyway, the King of the White Man saw
The tide continue to come in—waves fast—
About the shore’s circle,
Walking left, tracing the
Beach’s edge, watching birds
Float easily through cold
Fog, the sun, midwinter
Hidden, distant, forever unknown.
Anyway,
Just so often, he
Turns around and sees
Her, sees her the
Way she once was,
Young, fresh, eager, untouched,
Her blonde hair in
A tight bell around
Her shoulders’ fantastic arc.
Anyway,
He would gladly tell her
Everything if she would
Only return; he relives
Numberless vague nights of
Oily visions, slime bearded
Ruins of continuous loss,
Loneliness and no one
Ever like his Lora.
Eventually, he gave it up,
And moved somewhere surrounded
By an ocean of dry, red dirt.


84. The New Decade

Rushed into
A new promise shouting drugstores, with
A voice whose red hair hung
Mid-shoulder length, and whose hands, when
Empty, were really two small birds
Trapped between oncoming cars. Had
A nasal-spray mind that required severe
Alternations between home-style cooking and a
Savage drought (complete with all the
Wandering and comically serious introspection that
Starved an entire generation of Steppenwolf
Fans). Left the eighties with
No heart, but a new eel skin
Billfold, bankbook, BMW, and the pawn
Stubs for three fingers, two teeth
And the secret flags of all
Dreams. Will sleep with the
Tide, the seasons, or the sun,
And will hold nothingness as casually
As beer, lingering too long nowhere,
And waking up only seconds before
Eviction and quite possibly death.


129. Hart Crane Goes Berserk

Glittering in a glittering suit, cuffs
Just so, the shirt folds might
Have been fatal in themselves if
Held against outstretched elbows; he frowned
And continued staring at his drink
Like a cat peering into a ditch.

He removed himself, turned on
The polished toe of a polished
Shoe and danced out: goodbye, everyone,
Goodbye. A last wave, more waves,
Goodbye.

Accidental variants are the sorts
Of things one expects to find
In obscure texts—misread and poorly
Corrected—not lifestyles. I couldn’t help
It, he said later, I was
Drunk, it was late, too late,
Really, for sense or pride. Goodbye,
Everyone, goodbye.

None of the ship’s
Original forks survive; in the late
Sixties, they were melted into car
Frames and tore our roads into
Hard alloys of detachment and despair
Before crashing into night and stars
Myriad.

Losing control is required, needed,
But in planned moderation: go for
It they say, but when the
Price is called, you learn there
Are no refunds, only regrets and
Sharp guilt.

The harbor, greasy and
Foul was in the city’s soul,
Like vomit laying visible but politely
Ignored (dog vomit is left on
The lawn until re-eaten or washed
Into the soil). Goodbye, everyone, goodbye.

One possible vision explained
Calmly that the
Lobster does not bark and knows
The secrets of the sea: they
Led him away, they locked him
Up, they threw away the key,
Threw it into the sea, a
Lobster dragged it away and ate
It with the sea’s other secrets,
One day I cracked a claw
Open and out it fell, clunk.

Not many days are clear
With hope neither can despair
Be said to soar overhead with
The buzzards; both figures stand right
Behind us, coughing. Both figures dance
In front of us, pretending a state between
Apoplexy and orgasm, but one as certain and
Shifting as the tides: goodbye, everyone,
Goodbye.

Drink this, they say, eat
This and your hands will turn
White, the days will grow colder,
You will grow colder in winter—
No longer a good time to
Be alive—at least you will
Live, but you will feel every
Second stolen and gain only fragments,
Only interludes, only denouement.

Surf urchins sand shell shucks treble
Interjections sun lightning waves waves thunder sand kids dog

Let’s leave well enough
Alone, enough of that: goodbye, everyone,
Goodbye.

The ship’s deck was teak.
The ship’s deck chairs were teak.
The moldings around the baseboards in
The salon were teak. I would
Like to buy some teak. I
Would like to take a leak.
I would like some tea. I
Am the sea. me e and
Then emptiness and sudden decay. Yesterday,
When the pot fell, you said:
Entropy. I am entropy. I am
Me.
Sea .

Goodbye, everyone, goodbye.
At this point I was going to
Insert yet another brief quotation from
My primary source, but no such
Luck, no such inspiration is forthcoming
Only a partial rhupunt of mixed
Quality: brilliant night/not wrong/not
Right/I turned from light/and
Left/for parts unknown/to darkly
Roam/from land from home/bereft.
Let’s leave well enough alone. Enough
Of that. Goodbye, everyone, goodbye.

Rumor
Has it that the sea still
Cries for the life it lost
To the land, the life it
Reaches for with every tide. I
Haven’t read any of his writing.
Had the titanic been an almighty
Swizzle stick in an ocean of
Gin and dry vermouth, the survivors
Could have clung to a vast
Bobbing toothpick and foraged on a
Gigantic olive. I still haven’t read
Any of his writing.

The teak
Deck and the ocean in the
Thirties: moonlight foxtrots across the broken
Face of the inconstant waves, light
Breeze, light noise and inside fine
Dining and the secrets of the
Sea. I will never read any
Of his writing. Goodbye, everyone, goodbye.

Glittering in a glittering suit, manicured
Nails, French cigarettes (a habit from Harvard),
A world of hair oil and
Razor blades bathed in steam. It’s
No use, there’s no point, I
Don’t know anything about Hart Crane.
I haven’t read anything about Hart
Crane. This isn’t a real portrait
At all, this inaccurate text mirroring
Unknowable life, but I mean no
Disrespect and only wish to mirror
Dancing by moonlight on a fine
Teak deck death by drowning lobsters
And the final secrets of the
Sea. Goodbye, everyone, goodbye.

A CONFESSION
In the last entry, there was a poem about Ted Hughes. The incident is a conflation of two separate events. The first was a cocktail party at Dave Godfrey's house on the rocky part of Cadboro Bay in Victoria, BC. Godfrey's house hung over the edge of a 20 foot or so drop, and had a huge wall of glass and, for the most part, I just stood there watching the tide come in. I was probably 20 or 21 at the time. Irving Layton was there, and Layton was the one who told me my poem was shitty. He said that all a poet needs is one good line, and then he added "it's not in this one." I was sort of bummed out at the time, but today, I find it funny.

As far as Hughes is concerned, I did meet him a few times, and it was always somewhat disconcerting that he spoke with my Dad's accent. My Dad is from Withernsea over on the Yorkshire coast, and Hughes, I think, was from somewhere in the middle of the West Riding.

The funny thing about Hughes reading from what would eventually become the Birthday Letters, is that the poem I remember him trying out on us (just a few of Skelton's poetry students), isn't in the finished book. I guess it's in that locked footlocker in Emory. The poem was some sort of direct reply to Plath's "Daddy". To the best of my recollection, the poem used the word "Daddy" an awful lot. His reading was stunning, but Hughes was a great reader. Skelton had him give us little students some pointers. That was the stated purpose of the little meeting.

THE SEA

The sea is just about the most important thing in the world to me. Not this piece of shit Altantic Ocean. The Pacific. In particular, the Juan de Fuca and the water around the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. If you're a body of water and you're not the Juan de Fuca, you suck ass.


15. This Is The Damaged Epistle, The

One made out of dissonant branches,
Cut, exposed dead earth, and no
Design whatsoever. Let us let it vanish
Into silly blue clouds of silver
Contrary pains: everything instant and rabid.

This is the epistle that keeps
Speaking even after all the words
Are said; the first version was
Flesh, ground and scraped, exhumed dead
Flesh. In the March of 1985, I was idle,
And years escaped just like that.

I wrote these words back then,
In yellow and white and with
Explosions and highways and pulleys, and
With two grown men rimming like
There was no tomorrow, and for
This epistle, there was not. Pull close,
Span the last few feet and
Lift your alluring soul up to
My lips; that is why I am here,
After all, to absolve and absorb,
To open and accent, to vanish
And varnish, to instantly control momentum,
To dredge seaweed from mouths of drowned failures.

This epistle is a known concept,
Where castles shore up considerable crime.
This epistle disguises its face and
Walks the streets once more.


This next poem has nothing to do with the sea, except that a) this is one of the poems that the previous poem references (line 14, to number it from including the title), and b) Ted Hughes used to visit Robin Skelton whenever Hughes was around BC. Hughes came by quite a bit because he was a huge steelhead fan. Steelhead are trout that get confused and head off into the sea. So this poem is sort of about the sea. It's about a girl named Lora that I once had a crush on.


105. A Sheen Of Red And Yellow, And

Mottled by the cherry trees

Outside, sunlight filters in from
The west and creeps across
His desk like an amber turtle;
Like an amber leaf tumbling though

The still current of
An amber brook, he walks towards
An open door, and watches
Across the highway as if it was
A field of daffodils growing
On the bank of a choking lake.
He steps outside, stands

On the pavement, and his eyes follow
The horizon to far away.

But that is not how it happened: who can
Describe the empty thoughts behind getting
Up every day, behind waking up every
Morning, behind pulling on trousers slowly
Enough to live, just for a few minutes,
Life on its own; who can describe even
In the most minimal way, the ceaseless
Futility of it all, the way the days
Edge themselves into a thick mass that
Eventually takes you up, and casts you
You away onto an amber island
Of your own post-romantic construction,
Where the empty bottles pile up against
A frozen and catastrophic sky?

But that is not it either: it was New
Year’s Day, in 1985, and I spent
The entire morning vomiting
Into the urinal before I passed
Out on the gleaming bathroom floor; the King
Of the White Man, my boss at the time—
Fat and always wearing a nasty
Velour Sergio Tachini track suit—
Sweating and still drunk from the night before,
Surfaced in an excited mood, and walked
Around the office looking for Lora:
She was sitting on the photocopier, crying
And complaining about him, saying
That he did not love her in the usual way,

Which I thought meant that love had to follow
Some grand and noble plan in her mind,
Some banal or insane course of action
Suggested by years of insipid
After school pregnant teenage drug using specials,
But really she just meant that she was sick
Of only having anal sex, and sick
Of a long line of relationships
That invariably resulted
In her dog’s severed head winding up in her
Mailbox, silently mouthing, doggy style,
An angry letter from the last man who
Mistreated her but who was too busy
To find a pair of sharp enough scissors.

And then the firm collapsed, and the King
Of the White Man stiffed me four thousand
Dollars, and Lora did not get the necklace
I had ordered for her, and I did not
Tell her about it because I was too
Embarrassed, and all was fourteen
Stinking lines of a stinking poem
That never got published nowhere by no one.

When Ted Hughes read those fourteen stinking lines,
He crumpled the page into a ball and
Bounced it off my head, saying: this is shit.
Ted Hughes said: you only need one good line
In your entire career, but then added:
It certainly is not here.

So I took another drink and watched the lake
Lurch up against the garden; there was nothing
To do, so I got up and left Ted Hughes sitting
On my friend’s couch and walked away.
Hughes ignored me, pulled out a folded
Sheet of yellow legal-sized paper, and read
One of the Birthday Letters: of course, at that time
It was just some stuff he was working on.

I wish I had sold my car and got her
The necklace; Lora would not have cared,
Would not have fallen in love with me for it,
But she would have kept the thing.
I saw her once, years later, wearing
A fur coat that the King of the White Man
Had given her. She was with someone else
By then, and that was okay too.

GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES
I once dated an ex-Mormon girl for a few weeks. Lora, was her name, and she claimed to be directly descended from Oliver Cromwell. Since she was a recovering Mormon, I believed her, as the LDS are wicked good geneologists, mostly due to their retroactive baptism thing.

She was one of thos Mormons who converted to being a Mormon. She must have had one of those Judy Blume religious holes in life moments, and for some fucked up reason, went and joined what was obviously the wrong team. She even found some seemingly random Mormon guy and got married. Well, first she moved to Utah. Got married in Salt Lake City, even, and she told me how she'd cried and cried after she was made to wear some polyester poncho over her wedding dress, and how creepy the whole "annointing" with oil ritual was.

Her husband was probably a closeted queer, as a lot of Mormon men are--a friend of mine used to live in Salt Lake City when she edited one of those UFO shows, and she said that there was nothing quite as lively as a gay bar in Utah.

Anyhow, back to Lora. Her husband and some weird thing about sex and used to make her pray and pray and pray after having it. He'd make her get down on her hands and knees and beg forgiveness for it, and the most fucked up thing he'd say was "and use your own words." Like she's going to somehow crib a prayer to apologize to god for fucking her husband.

Anyhow, one day she just fled. Took off across the country going from expensive hotel to expensive hotel, with him in hot pursuit. He eventually even caught up with her and there was some crazy "if you pray long enough, I'll let you come back to me moment" that drove her virtually into hysterics. Against his wishes, she divorced him, and years later, I pinned to the headboard a couple of times. Curious fact, I was the first non-alcoholic she had dated since getting divorced. Apparently, her ex-husband was a member of one of the most prominent families in Salt Lake City and was now happily remarried and had about six children (which seems implausible consdidering she'd only been divorced for four years).

There are a few observations I can make at this time:

1. in really devout Mormon families--that aren't just hypocritically faking it for social advantage--the life of constant denial proves to be good for the skin. Lora had perfect skin. Softer at 27 than you could possibly believe.

2. Mormon girls are awesome at kissing. Sex is sex, but a person's sensuality and talent really shines out at kissing. She said that she really did remain a virgin until she got married, and had to spend all of her excess energy just kissing.

3. Ex-Mormons really really really hate the LDS.

Here are two poems: one I wrote for her, and one I wrote about her. Of the two, the first is probably more interesting. I threw in some quotations from one of the OT levels because it just seems to go so well. The second one was written for my creative writing students at Yale to show them one possible way of responding to another poet's work.


285. What Has Got To Snap Before

I see your past:
A great trek of faith and mercy
And wasted currency, walking through the salt flats
Toward Provo, with nothing up your sleeve
But the future curse of three bad years,
Two bad lovers,
And no end in sight.

Why must your dreams wade headlong into
All those fences you hate:
Hotels in the Rockies wave at you,
And even though you despise the idea,
You strip naked and enter the shower,
While a well-dressed Mormon boy rifles through
Your most sacred prayers.
Your silence is just another curtain,
Producing cardinal works for a clock view
Of an endless journey to nowhere.

Have you agreed that you were no good?
Have you agreed that you were harmful or evil?
Have you permitted someone else to dominate you?

All reasons are rich and sad wonders. Get down
On your knees and pray
And use your own words.


206. Reply to Rumi and Lawrence on snakes:

I knew this girl who would throw up if she smelled the rain on pavement:
That's a quotation from someone you don't know.

So what if some idiot Sufi poet had a thing against
Snakes? Look into the hard eye of a particular
Snake, an orange and black and yellow one,
All the colors of Indian corn, look into
His eye, orange and black and hard,
Look into his eye
And he will look back.

When you pick him up, this orange
And yellow and black snake is like
Butter, soft and warm, and he glides
Through your hands with inconceivable ease.
He has no smell, no musk, his skin is smooth,
Much smoother than your own, smoother still
Than your child's skin when she was first born,
And when this black and orange
And yellow snake flicks his tongue, it feels on your skin
Like the wings of butterfly once touched
When you were ten.

But Rumi was right,
The snake has no knowledge
Of friendship, but if you trust Lawrence's account,
We don't either, so it's fair.

So you put the snake down, you let him go, and
As a parting gesture, he yawns for you, opens
His double-hinged jaws wide, and you see the
Tiny twin rows of infinitesimal teeth; this snake,
After all, eats only small things and lacks venom.
And with that he's gone, and you're left with
The smell of the rain on the pavement.

THE WICKED WITCH OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
But there are also some beautiful things in this creation. When the wind tears the mid-west tall grass prairie’s remaining strands into open-faced arabesques, that is beauty. When the hail beats the water-soaked pavement and the metal and glass and plastic skins of shining cars echo-hard, that is beauty. And, from the air, when you begin the ceaseless journey toward the continent’s still center, that is also beauty. And beauty too may be found in the straight lines and wheat fields and flint hills, in the roads, in the black furrows, in the rivers running through their own static domains, in the lakes, in the depressions, and in the great yellow-painted prairie which shines like some fantastic suit. But know, all of you, that beneath this glittering apparel is the Earth itself, hard and uninterested in the trivial greens and blues and whites and blacks of its skin, unconcerned with mere beauty.

I was living with, Lora, some skinny-legged, black-haired bitch, or was, rather, no longer living with some skinny-legged, black-haired bitch, as she had just left me.

A lot of my friends blamed it on Kansas; no relationship can survive Kansas, it’s such a cruel, stupid place, nothing good can last, and people get changed by it before they realize what is happening.

With us, though, the break-up was really for the best. The woman was insane, quite clearly insane. Vaginismus, anaesthetic hysteria, various paraphilias, barely latent lesbianism, anorexia, severe hair loss... the list went on and on. To hell with her, really, she was more trouble than she was worth. Still, for a while there I felt guilty. Here’s a letter I wrote:

Jesus, Lora, I just wish there was some way of finding you, or what is left of you, that is, what is left of your image beyond those reflections caught on the sidewalk. Here, the lightning has stopped, leaving the sky empty. The clouds have moved over to the Northeast. I can hear the birds rustling in the trees beside the road; rain from the branches brushes against me. It is very humid, very hot and I am quite alone.

Although it will be nearly impossible, let me explain how everything happened. Let me grasp from the rain whatever logic exists in the shadows and explain; for once, let me speak, and, please, truly listen to my words. Be gentle: I’d give anything to be with you—seriously, this much at least is true.

Who have I seen? What have I done? Perhaps it’s easier to start with the distant past, when I was someone else.

It was dark. The sounds of the night came through the floor and wounded their way up and into the bed. The comforter was on the floor beside our clothes, the ceiling trusses were centimeters away from our faces in the loft; your head was cast against my shoulder, and I could feel your breath against my collarbone. We had known each other for only a few weeks, and up until then I hadn’t understood my emotions. Your hair spilled over my chest and blended with the darkness.

—What’s love?

And so I had to think about this for a while. I’m no expert; my observations up to then had been random at best, forced at worst. Those who I had been with I had convinced, quite wrongly, that I was in love with them. During those times, I was perhaps in love with relationships, the comfort of a body to touch, the absence of loneliness, and sometimes perhaps not even that much. Only now that I am without the company of others do I truly love them. I love them all with all of myself. They are now me.

So at first, nothing between you and I seemed at all different. Our experience was every experience. And so a few more minutes passed in the darkness until I said:

—Love is a kind of falling, but you never know how far, or how long it will be until the ground.

You didn’t say anything. You didn’t have to. I knew you had fallen. And so had I. It would take me a while to write about you, though, but when the words found themselves, they were real:

when lost like rail cars
when lost like machine yards in obliterating rain
when lost like concrete and black urbanity
I find peace in the city’s narrow throat
and your voice
with all of its perfect inflections and intonations
comes across me suddenly
into memory, my least blind part

Words were fine, and I suppose, from the safety of years, I can say that the years passed. But speech was different: my first attempts were clumsy. I never knew what to say when things weren’t going well. You never listened to me, anyway. Never tried to make things improve between us. That’s okay, in hindsight, I wasn’t worth the effort.

—We have to talk.

—What about?

I could have strangled you; you knew perfectly well what we had to talk about. My touch repelled you, or so it seemed. My life, which I had never tried to hide, also repelled you, or so it seemed. What could I say? What did I always say?

—Sex.

—What about it?

—It’s the shits.

And so you started crying and I had to change my mind, beg, weep against your chest, tell you that I was sorry, that I was wrong, tell you that sex was wonderful, beautiful, tender. I had to tell you I was wrong. And it was wrong, because inside my head it was much worse; I was right. You were terrible in bed, you didn’t know how to kiss, you just lay there like a starfish, mouth gaping, with no sense of motion, rhythm, adventure, anything. You didn’t even fuck; at least that would have been something… the sweat against my skin… my raw hands. And I knew it wasn’t my fault; I had a good enough body, I could kiss, I was tender, even delicate at times, I cared, was sensual. By then, I loved you with all of myself.

I ground my teeth, and measured the distance from my hand to your face. Wouldn’t it be easier to hit you? End things like that? Wouldn’t it be cricket to put all that guilt and blame on myself? And things never really got any better anyway. We’d argue, time and time again. Always the same outcome, always the same broken promises. And I stop trusting you, and separated the sexual side of our lives from the emotional and intellectual sides, which, themselves, had always been distinct.

And to be honest, not only were you frigid, sexless, loveless, and even more self-centered than I, but you put animals ahead of things, things ahead of people. You were politically naive, simple, mindless in fact. You were anti-social, anti-art, anti-culture, anti-all those things which meant so much to me, yet I would have died for you, if only to be remembered for it.

Of course you never read a word I wrote. Perhaps this is untrue, unfair. There were times when you did struggle through the occasional page, but it was always forced. I don’t think you ever realized how close to fragmenting my life was. I don’t think you ever realized how hurt your profound ignorance made me. Of course I never opened up, did I? Would it have helped?

The telephone empties into hurricanes, why won’t you call?
Can’t you see design
the dawn
the sun rising slowly behind the radio tower
requires your vision?
Everything requires your vision
why won’t you call?

And, fairly though, you never claimed to be emotional, and if you ever had any side to your life other than the existential, you used it all up on that first night. On the other hand, I have no excuse; and my world is now much darker than yours ever was.

Your left thigh
is a hard white stone
gently whispering abstract names
which I hear better than my own name.

So I’ve been dating a pretentious little sorority cunt: a stupid vicious slut with no brains, no ability, no manners, and yet she managed to get under my graying skin pretty easily. It could have worked except I was too interested in fucking the daylights out of her, twisting off her top, unfastening her bra, taking her hardening nipples into my mouth, gently pulling her underwear down her thin legs, easing myself into her wet body. I wanted to fuck her, nothing more. I suppose she was bright enough to sense this.

But what else is there to do to someone? Such a situation. It was difficult, you know. There is always that side to a relationship. The problem was, the less love I received from you, the more brutal that fucking had to become. And I couldn’t fuck you, could I now? I loved you.

So with what’s her face on her couch, her shirt off, her thick nipples strained against my tongue, her flat stomach against my palm, her legs spread and black-tighted crotch rubbing against my ripped jeans, what was that? When I twisted my hand behind her, and let my finger push past her underwear, past her wet lips and then inside her, what was that? When after I had made dinner and she showed me her poetry, what was that? And when she told me how empty she felt without a baby inside her, what was that? Why did I feel empty also?

So with that other one on the dance floor, her dress against my flank, black hair in my mouth, my hand going from around her back to her breasts, what was that? And later, in the car, her lips pressed to mine quite hard, her mouth opening, her tongue inside my mouth, running over my teeth, my lips, what was that? And when I just said goodnight to her, without touching her, without bringing her inside, or going inside with her, what was that?

So with the nextdoor neighbor on the front porch, her legs spread wide under the watchful eye of my sleepless roommate, what was that? With her in the bathroom, wiping my semen from her chest with a handful of stolen toilet paper, what was that? So with me walking her back to her house, back to her husband, who by then was quite asleep, what was that? And with all the ridicule I endured, the harsh words and reproaches from my friends, which hardened, truly, my senses, what was that? Why did the truth, why did action and emotion all seem so alien suddenly?

It was hurricane: people without names populating a blank stage for a few short hours, watching their lives and everything they ever worked for disappear. All the time, they know the world, or at least a small part of it, is watching. They know that beyond the hardwood and studio carpet, the shifting sets and the curtain and the pit are the souls who only watch. But no one knows every part of the action, no one understands the whole dialogue. It’s a hurricane, and I can hear the winds build against the sky and dive into the surf, run headlong into the shore and against the palms. It’s a hurricane, and the sky is heading to shadow. There are strange shapes ahead.

So with that poor bitch, her husband in the hospital, alone one night— perhaps in her own small fashion more alone than anyone else in the world—what was that? So with her on my bed, her legs straddling mine, her breasts against my face, her black sweater on the floor, what was that? And when she took me into her mouth, rubbed me against her chest, what was that? And when she guided me toward her, and I rolled away, recoiling, what was that?

sans reproach
indeed nothing inside her soul to rail against
not the night the night is not her fault
not sex that follows conversation
emptied drinks
cigarettes sucked ash ended to the very coals
which stick on hardened fingertips

I was a stranger
and you took me in
tonight o eos
the world has aged

No more eloquence. No more fancy words, spoken in haste but thought of the night before. No more mirror bound rehearsals. I have to be more than candid. I mean no harm, no vengeance. If I have been brusque, I apologize. I am merely reporting this now dead reality of ours. And I suppose it is dead, although in memory it still exists. Somewhere in time, I am still beside you in the dark, and still in love. Somewhere in time, perfection is still possible.

What a crock! All those beds other than mine, all those legs and those lips and those arms. And you know there were many more even still. And you know that you could have read about them, turned the pages as they happened. What would I have said? It was all there, after all, wasn’t it? Every name, every woman, every centimeter of skin, every taste of sweat, every cunt or breast or stray part I touched, kissed or fucked was on display, on display for you. One glance and you could have seen it all. Perhaps if you had looked, there would have been only yourself in those pages.

over the long time things talk us gently
unlistening except sometimes we turn and
discord
something inside smashes through

If I glance down now, all I can see is that the sidewalks have begun to dry. It so important that I remain outside, if I stray, even for a moment, I will not be able to stop myself. Why couldn’t I ever talk to you, reasonably that is? I guess it’s because you had me nervous for all those years, twisted my guts around until I was too scared to let even a small part of my personality through. Perhaps if you’d seen the real me, you would have vanished. I’d love to finish, follow your trail back home, walk along this sidewalk until I arrive back where we met.

She never got that letter, never got any of the dozens that I must have written to her while I was still trapped in the mid-west. It doesn’t matter though, because, realistically speaking, the bitch wasn’t worth words, and later I found out that she had been sleeping with one of my best friends. That bothered me for a while, but not for too long, really. When you reach my age, you cease to be interested in those sorts of things beyond the initial shock, but what a shock that can be! I’ll always remember the first time it happened. My original love, my Lora. That was a long time ago, mind you, and in a different country.

THREE WASTED YEARS

from 102.
On some long dead channel
Are the waves of my regret.

I told Lora as much when I kicked her out. Knowing you, I said, has been a waste of three years of my life. God, I hate you, I said. Maybe I should back up a bit. On my birthday, May 8, 1992, in Wichita, Kansas, I went out for a beer and didn't come back for a couple of days. Lora and I hadn't been getting along particularly well, but had established a sort of uneasy truce. When I returned to the squalid studio apartment, she was itching for a fight. Called me a slut and all manner of nonsense. During the argument, it came out that she'd been seeing some guy for about a month! I offered to break her neck if she didn't leave immediately. I watched her carry her boxes to the roadside, and then I made a big pitcher of strawberry dacquiris and sat on my porch and watched her cry until one of my classmates (who was banging a famous Palestinian professor, may I add), came and picked her up. She went back to Victoria, to Sidney, where her folks lived, and phoned me up a bunch of times. She also fucked one of my friends, but she was such a lousy lay that it was never worth it to get all that upset. I am still angry about the wasted time aspect of it all. When I look back at all my poems, it's absurd to think this is practically all I have to show for three long years.


18. She Asks:

What are you thinking of? Oranges?
Are you thinking of oranges? Grapes?
Eyes? Blind and in the dark?
The spiral designs on the Paris
Underground? Are you thinking about telephones,
Aspirin, anise, cloves, the foot of
The devil, are you thinking about
The devil’s cloven foot? Jesus? The
Saints? Are you thinking about baseball?
Broomsticks? Magic? Music? Are you thinking
About music, electricity, magnetism, Einstein’s wild
White hair? Please tell me what
You are thinking, please. I would
Like to say you. I am
Thinking of you.


19. To Give It A Sense Of Age, I Called It

A crackling phonograph, to add reverence
And mystery I said the voice
Emerged from the ages, but the
Voice is not important and neither is
The sound it makes as it
Is carried down the stylus and
Into the air. What is important,
Is how you hold your hands.
Let me say that the ivies
That grow on the side of
The house grow hollow without you,
As do all flowers, all paintings,
All poems, and all the sky’s stars.


20. Simple

And declarative are those times when
Lost like rail cars, when lost
Like machine yards in obliterating rain,
When lost like concrete and black
Urbanity, I find peace in the
City’s narrow silent throat, and your voice,
With all of its perfect inflections
And intonations, comes across me suddenly,
Into memory, which is my least blind part,
And I, although alone, can hold
You close once more.


21. How About A Poem About

The sea, a poem as green
As the sea is supposed to
Be, as deep and as wet as
The exiled deeps must be? How about
A poem about a house, a
Poem built Cape Cod clapboard, white-
Fronted and ivied by tendrils as
Green as all summertime ivies are?
How about a poem about the
Wind, a poem that rages as
Hard as the last hurricane (a thin
Trickle here on the other side of Long
Island)? How about
A poem about a tree, one
That grows thick bark about its
Middle and pulls inside its old wounds?
How about a poem that simply
Says: I love you?


30. Over The Long Time Things Talk Us Gently:

These words are eaten by
Brambles, these words are eaten by
Leaves. Butterflies in Japan fly cho
Cho, wings beating so-softly, anyhow, our language
Does not do them justice. The concrete
Is a scar that all the
Cultured ivies in the world cannot
Heal; it has only been seven months,
Yet I cannot even open my
Window to breathe, my building is
Sealed, ceiling-air-fed hollow by metal
Ducts, while outside life is buried by
Asphalt three meters thick. When someone
Smashes through everyone stares, surprised at
The wet brown earth. Over the
Long time things talk us gently,
Un-listening except sometimes when we turn
And something inside smashes through. I
Was talking yesterday to some man,
Staring at the earth, brown and
Fertile, I cannot remember what about.

Oh, Jesus, Lora liked Japan, fell
In love with it the way you might slowly find
Yourself doing so at work—sitting a few desks
Away from Japan, the sunlight coming in
Just so—staring at Japan’s
Face for a bleak year, the stress building
And building up until, you take
Japan into the copy room at the Christmas party, unzip
Japan’s short schoolgirl skirt, ease
Down Japan’s Hello Kitty panties, tear the buttons
Off Japan’s shirt, undo
Japan’s bra, and then, afterwards
Find tiny paper animals
On your desk for few embarrassing months,
Maybe more, until you quit your job,
And stop thinking about Japan—deliberately—
Until you are so old it no longer matters.


95. Within This Landscape Are A Thousand

Simple dichotomies not preserved in
The dry cuneiform of an
Antique civilization, but honestly lost.
This hillside, the one beneath
The paradisiacal smoke of the
Western cascades once held random
Dwellings, which have now descended
Into the river, whose graven
Tracks whisper between land and
Sea. All the original green
Languages and obscure mythologies have
Collapsed, and their gospels and epistles
Go unread, as if some
Obliterating force holds their complete
Liturgy beyond the grasp of
The callow penitents who would
Base an entire generation of
Priests on that which is
Not and move the river’s
Grade still further from the
Sea.


130. Not A Toccata Wound Through The Wet

Nests and matted straw
Of Saint Thomas’s stone sides,
Nor a Picasso held far
Above 5th Avenue (whose narrow
Margins burst with perfume and
Exhaust), not even captives and
Sidelined heroes resting in sodden
Niches: nothing can equal you.
Today, after the silver was
Cleared away, and the decanters
Emptied, and the candles nub-end
Pulled and replaced, after the
Trees lost their crows and
Pigeons, and the streets refilled,
After everything had wandered off
To silence, you, your voice and
Every image of you
Found its way back to me.


131. My Heart Is Late And Without Shoes,

Arriving only moments before dawn, it holds
Trout gently turning in its hands;
I’m sorry the streams are deserted,
I’m sorry the rocks have been
Removed and granite has been mined
From the shores without consideration. I
Would shiver, but all motion has
Ceased; wary and quite alone, the
Telephone empties into hurricanes. Why won’t
You call, can’t you see design,
The dawn, the sun rising slowly
Behind the radio tower requires your
Vision. Everything requires your vision, why
Won’t you call? It’s only moments
Before daybreak, why won’t you call?


134. We Are Separated By The

City’s spine, a blacktop backbone four
Lanes wide winding across our wrists
And ankles. In the churches, in
The parking lots, and in the
Shopping malls we hold our own.
Frustrated by nature’s criticism, we encase
Our horrified old idols in high
Technology, even our prescribed refuges (the
Narrow greenbelts, the manicured parks) are
Kept creatures, so we get no
Time away from record stores, no
Respite from complex arguments in a
Fast food world. If we were
Together we could look across the
Road and see each other’s faces,
Touch across its spine and
Sing our own construction.


196. How To Describe What In Absences

Became more? My emotions, my
Desires, all those shades on
The paper’s edge and those
Bones which encased my skeleton,
Were gone. The things which
I have carried inside my
Cognition, my vocation (between the
Smallest parts of my smallest
Parts) were no more a
Concern, no more a thing
Than the empty streets and
The music behind us, as
My palms went across your
Shoulders and through your hair.


197. Within The Disparity Of Silence And The

Hiss of many birds’ wings lies
Your voice, as subtle as flowers
Or grass, green and quite angular in
The sun. Life is burnt always
In dog barks and construction sites;
Everyone is building something, monoliths rise
And fall uneventfully, they crack and
Decay like bark even in sleep.
What place does love have
In this bark world, where totems
Are carved and burnt for forgotten
Purposes, for no purpose at all,
Where messages are written and read, but
Never allowed to rot or be
Reclaimed by time and forgiveness. Voices
Are almost gone, and listening grows
Brittle with spring; talk to me,
I will hear, because within your
Voice is many things, and within
Mine is yours.


198. Tonight

I will dream in a more
Absent language, spend
Phantom vocabularies vainly, until I
Lie exhausted and empty by the
Peach tree. We should have sprayed
It early in the year, its
Leaves redden and curl like burning
Plastic. Although the earth was too
Cold for planting, the soil absolved
Our guilt, newly dug, it spoke
Green on our breath, and its
Words hammered softly against us. In
The dampness and promise of our
Grim world, very little still speaks
In those tones. Muted, we waited
For the seasons to pass, culled
Weeds into managed decay, then decay
Into meticulous order. Perhaps nothing else
Speaks like that anymore.
Before sleep,
I will forget all highways, remove
Birth and rebirth, like unwanted earth
Is carried by rivers to the
Sea, then in dream loses my
Voice, and, listening, wait for the
Words I will not know.


204. There Is Hope In

The shape of your hair. When
You sleep, the armies down in
The sand are all but overcome
By the dry tide whose desiccate
Roar is sterile madness placed against
High technology. Your hands are tucked
Beneath your chin; life and attitude
Collide into subtle love as discrete
As new shoes, a sacred silver
Charm ,and the freedom to touch
Your body. In the desert, rust
Rolls over close-cropped coiffures and starched fatigues.
The young who wear them sleep
With their rifles; your left thigh
Is a hard white stone, to which I gently
Whispers abstract names I know
Better than my own voice. Yesterday the
Tanks vanished, yesterday the missiles vanished,
Yesterday the aircraft vanished under the
Rust and sand which slept alone.
There is hope in the shape
Of your hair.


from 268.

A group of old men going around the bend,
Whittling vast stacks of lumber into blind animals—
Old coyotes howl into a wooden sky—
While their makers
Rot in their patio chairs
Under the sun (or is it the moon),
Reminiscing hopelessly about their cocks,
Spending quiet senilities with their right hands wrapped
Around their talking sticks.
Listen to this, one says,
He bent her over the old couch and entered from behind.
She moaned or at least pretended to,
And everything went like clockwork,
But when they broke the skin,
She shit herself,
Lost all control,
Threw up,
Sobbed, shrieked.
It was difficult
For some of them more than others, even
Exciting. One drew a long line down
Her spine, peeled back the skin to reveal
The brown edge of her backbone. They
Bound her breasts until the bruised flesh
Practically fell off. She could
No longer see. By this time,
Everything was clear. Turns were taken,
Every part of her
Opened, new holes cut and quickly filled.
The final scenes, then,
Were nothing, an elixir, perhaps
Coiled from her own now-empty shell.
Nothing.
Then he came, and those who remained showered,
Then the video stopped rolling,
Everyone went home,
Ate dinner.
The stars eventually died,
The director eventually died,
The rest of the cast eventually died,
The world eventually died:
It was just another failure.

STRIP POKER

When I was studying for my first Master’s Degree, from 1989 until 1991, I lived at 1325 Finlayson Avenue in Victoria, British Columbia. I shared a three bedroom house with my best friend from childhood, David, and a rotating supply of other housemates. For a while, we lived with his brother, but had to evict him when his behavior proved too distracting to our studies. He had some sort of psychological issue that encouraged him to randomly take out supporting walls with a sledgehammer at 2 am while wearing nothing but tightie whities. (That night, I ended up using my kitchen mortar and pestle to pulverize three or four of his anti-psychotics, which I made him snort with a rolled up five dollar bill. It turned him instantly into kelp, and all he could talk about was a desire for pie. We went to the Overtime, an all night desert place owned by either Russ or Geoff Courtnall, and David’s brother ate some pie.)

After we kicked out the brother, we had a guy named Loserman live with us, but he left when he found our behavior too distracting for his studies. We had a garage band, The Four Canadian Jerks (a three piece) and rehearsed most weekends in the basement. Everyone was drunk from Thursday to Sunday, and I could be counted on to smoke a lot of pot and take a variety of other drugs as they came available.

Sooner or later, I’ll tell Laurie’s and The Swamp Thing’s stories.

Anyhow, for a couple of school terms, we had a housemate named Keri. Keri’s best friend was named Lora. Lora’s father was a pilot who retired to small town British Columbia, and she was engaged to some guy back in small town British Columbia. She was going to go and get married after her education, and I suppose she probably did.

So we were playing strip poker on a Thursday night, David, me, Keri, Lora, and another girl named Kari, who I’ll talk about some other time. David and I lost pretty much right away, and within short order, the girls were minus their tops, but that was about it. Nobody knew what to do next, and we were all too drunk to be anything other than ourselves.

Shirt back on, Lora took my hand, and stuck one of my fingers down her throat. She pulled it back out and said: “I have no gag reflex.” So we went into my bedroom and locked the door. I had made David promise to try and rescue me from myself, so pretty soon he was trying to batter down the door, in an effort to stop me from cheating on my girlfriend, yet again. This was when I was dating the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest, a hapless thing I cheated on with perhaps a dozen different girls or more.

Anyhow, I guess Lora must have felt some guilt, because she came over the next day to talk about what happened—which was nothing, I had gotten her top off, played a bit with her big fat boobs and then promptly passed out.

We sat on the couch and she talked about her boyfriend and all manner of nonsense. To shut her up, I started necking with her. We didn’t have sex or anything, but you’d think she was standing at the crossroads, reading the Devil’s contract over for the fiftieth time. She was shaking. Crying. Started going on and on about how she’d love to have sex with me, but couldn’t ruin her life. Asinine idiocy like that. Imagine, you’re 21 years old and all concerned about some mechanic who’s going to trap you in a shithole for the rest of your days while you raise child after child. I shrugged and agreed, and managed to talk her into driving me up to the campus, as I wanted to go to the bar, but didn’t want to drive.

The next day, I still wanted to see her, so I thought that a good idea would be for the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest and me to go to Lora’s house for dinner. The best part was listening to Lora play piano for us. She was amazing. One of the best pianists I’ve heard in real life. Her bathroom was really weird, as the ceiling was only about 5’4” and the toilet was on a platform, so you have to crouch over on the toilet to use it. I cannot imagine what Lora thought, sitting across from the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest; Lora kept a brave face up as I smiled and winked at her.

In retrospect, I guess it’s one of the shittiest things I’ve ever done to anyone. On the positive side, though, I got these out of the experience:


201. The Sea Calling Out So Softly

This isn’t sane, yet somehow
Rightnesses flood in through stray sensations:
The touch of your skin is the sea’s touch,
Inscribing gentle volumes across my body.
This is wrong,

But who am I to ignore feeling,
When feeling approaches
And encroaches substantially onwards
Through your lips to the tips
Of my fingers, brushing, always, your face.

This is truly the sea rising to apex, warming
The long cold of winter,
Startling and fresh in its innocence
(and perhaps sometimes too much experience).
Then suddenly it’s over
And the wave must be felt.

Where does love go when it dies?
I can see many currents
And the tide carrying it,
Turning it in motion, its eyes backward to the land,
Its hands held eager upward to the sky,
Gentle in its little drowning.


202. Had We Lived

We are, am, I and you,
Never now not so young as
To be what we always should
Have been, before the breakdown of
Our defenses, before the breakdown (or
Was it a temporary defection) of
Our, your, me and my senses,
That crossed in a flash, like
The dealing of cards. It’s hard
To tell what will happen until
All bets are truly known.
My bets are on the torn ticket,
The one forgotten in someone else’s
Pants, screwed up for now in
A corner. We are, am, I
And you never now not as
We were and would have liked
To really be, had we lived,
Truly lived.


203. Could You Sleep Either?

When I first held you, Jesus,
Nothing feels quite like suddenly finding
Refuge in another’s arms. Late though
It may have been, the skin
On the back of your neck
Glowed and sang, and then there
Was a silence, then a week
Or more of something akin to
Guilt or greed or passion. We’re
Always turning away our instinct adding,
New locks, new barricades to the old
Transepts. We beat our desires until they
Bleed for sanctity. An empty church
Is no place for a god
Too lazy to struggle and too
Hesitant to let loose.
Jesus, nothing feels
Quite like the dark, the still,
A single act, a great
Grasping, then a silence while the
Latch slowly turns.


205. She Was A Minor Muse;

Three poems made after a night
Of shallow debauchery. Why is
Why is sex always better when you feel
Like shit, not that it’s any
Great thrill to realize later that
You put your heart in an
Olive can and mailed it to
Sardinia, and the rest
Of your life galloped off to
The front, its saber rattling in
An otherwise empty scabbard of verbiage
And guilt. She was a straw
Muse, and danced for me as
She came so slowly apart.


266. She Played Very Much Sweetly;

In the piano’s structured keys is perfect mortality:
Intonations drift as through a lyric
Caught as stone.

Fuck you. When I had the chance,
I should have killed you in your sleep;
I should have left you to rot,
But instead I keep dredging you up
Like some antediluvian monster, pulled
Up across some stony beach,
Gasping for breath and terribly
Surprised by the inextinguishable sun.

SHANGRI-LA

Back in the early 1980s, when I was in high school, I had friend named Chris who as the term wore on, became quite profoundly schizophrenic. He ended up holding down three jobs (at a paint store, at a bike shop and, I believe, at Canadian Tire). He was trying to save up enough money to purchase a one way ticket to go to India to look for Shangri-La. He used to speak fairly elaborately about finding a city where the walls bled if you cut them and where the rock would grow back. A place where he could be immortal. Pretty soon he stopped talking to me, and refused to read my little poems (which had a bit of a cult following in the high school at the time). He then disappeared. He phoned my friend Jim some months later, and the story I got from Jim (who used to smoke a golf ball sized hunk-o-hash every week and so was a fairly unreliable source) was that Chris got picked up hitch hiking by someone and ended up in Mexico trying to run coke. He was put into a Mexican jail, bailed out by the embassy, and ended up in a mental institution in Vancouver. He apparently half way escaped one night and phoned Jim ranting on and on about becoming a male nurse. Chris was convinced that in 1997 when the Others come, they were only going to take male nurses and they weren't going to take women at all, mostly because women apparently explode upon entering hyperspace. Anyhow, about six months later, I saw Chris on a bus. He was wearing a hockey helmet and was fantasically covered with tattoos. He asked me if I had gone to school with him because, he said, he just didn't remember. I guess he got better because he eventually did a PhD in theology somewhere.

Anyhow, in about 1987 or so, I was thinking about Chris' quest, and, really high, with Lora on the beach at Montague Bay on Galiano Island, she suggested that Nirvana was a state experienced only by one person at a time, from moment to moment, from place to place, so that it always existed, but as a type of thread that will one day link all of us together. We were special, she said, because we were experiencing together. The one perfect moment.

The tide was coming in. We were sitting on a huge cedar log, a piece of driftwood, long lost from some floating boom. Somewhere off in the distance, perhaps past the Malahat on Vancouver Island, there was a slash burn going on, and the smoke (invisible to us) stained the sunset the most incredible shades of purple and red. As far as special effects go, those slash burn sunsets were fantastic, but I don't think you really get to see them anymore.

Lora had her arm around my waist and I had mine around hers. There was about maybe a minute or two of silence, and I felt such a sense of peace come over me that I know I'll never experience again. It was paradise, Nirvana, and like in Shangri-La, in that memory, I'll never grow any older, I'll never die. It's taken me a long long time to deal with it.

I remember being confused for a while.

from 70:

the sun,
The lost feeling, the waist
I encircled then and the one
I encircle now.

and then angry

192. My Next Act Will Be To Recreate

A single evening, when the beach front
And the horizon colored themselves
With the refracted light of
Burning clear cuts, and the beauty
Of the world spoke in one
Little dopey atmospheric effect, and some
Idiot, who arms circled my waist,
Said: this one moment is paradise,
This one moment is forever.

or this from one of a million different versions of 14:

We watched the wind, chase ripples
Across the ocean, the clouds
Were like downcast eyes. We
Closed our distances in an
Atmosphere of serene carelessness, and
I thought: now. And you became
To me as one moment
Is to the next.

At that time I was
More content with death than
With the most ornamental eternity.

How wrong, how futile, how silly is every
Vain and stupid child wish. Imagine that,
Forever and day with some idiot you
Loved many years ago

Of course, that's a poem that I later edited to include this thought:


But, of course, that is not true either, and now at an expanse
Of twenty years, I would once again curtail that one moment’s
Expression and expansion—perhaps now even further—condensing
The gesture or the single solicitation into a fixed point, harder
Than any metal, rarer all the more for the eventual knowledge—
Certainty, abstract and theoretical solace—of the scarcity of its successors—
That feeling you once felt, everyone, will never be as strong again,
And it would have been better if you had never felt at all.


This is from 29:

Where are you
When you are asleep?
Are you resting
Beneath the arms of Cyprus or
Laurels, resting on the fringe of
A favorite beach, staring
At the approaching tide?
Are you waiting for me there,
Waiting to see me, anxious
To hear my voice call your name?

I guess a couple more won't hurt:

348. Are The We, No:

A vastness of pines, a herd of pines, a suicide
Of pines, a twilight of pines that cling perilously
To the slim side of day, that cling to the reckless earth (drunk
On rotten fallen apples and, of course, on pines):

This is my soul imagining someone else's waist—
Not yours! To me, your waist is a transparent anchor
In a field of borrowed winds, winds that the wind god desperately wants
Back; but someone else's waist is another thing indeed.

She has a name, had a name, or perhaps has one by now.
And what a waist! I can put my real hands on her real hips,
Trace, with a real gesture, scars and tattoos—my real touch,

Not a river touch, or a bell touch, or even a
Resonant touch that echoes from the Andes to here,
And she's a woman, not a doll or a silence or a pine.

I probably feel most like this today, some sort of dim feeling that maybe Lora was right. This was written in November of 1990, but I'm still happy with it. from 278:

And not simply easy sonnets,
That hissed through all the poems of Propertius,
That slid through all the poems of Horace,
That slithered through all the poems of Ovid,
And ended up
Bleeding in the penultimate book of the Odyssey,
Their black skinned backs broken
At every single vertebra,

But everything,

THE PROPOSAL

A One Act Play

It is the summer of 1985. The west coast of Canada is not quite roasting, but it is simmering. A young man and a young woman are swimming in an in ground pool in a suburban backyard. The pool is surrounded by a concrete patio, complete with all the usual tables and chairs, towels, a stereo and so on. It is obvious that this is someone's parents' house and that the two are temporary interlopers, slacking off in the middle of someone else's workday. The young woman, LORA, is 5'4" and 107 pounds. She has honey blonde hair and large brown eyes. She has a magnificent rack and is wearing a bright blue bikini. She is 18. Her boyfriend, ALEXI, is grey-eyed and slightly crazy looking, with an improbabe tan, long bleached blond hair and a pair of orange dayglo Ocean Pacific surfing shorts. He may or may not have smoked dope earlier. He is in good spirits proud beyond measure of just having been accepted into the local university following an appeal to the Faculty Senate. He thinks he's hot stuff and has the entire world spread out in front of him. LORA swims over to him and wraps her legs around ALEXI'S waist. He backs into the corner of the pool and she throws her arms around his neck.


LORA (conspiratorially): POTATO

This is their code word for LORA's period.

ALEXI (massive relief): Thank fuck for that.

LORA: Why? What would you have done?

ALEXI (chuckles): I would have sent you a postcard from Mexico.

LORA (kisses him on forehead): No, silly. Really. What would you have done?

ALEXI: I don't know. I'm still really happy you're not. If it happened in a couple of years, I'd...

LORA: You'd what?

ALEXI: I dunno, probably marry you or something.

LORA: And what if I got pregnant next year?

ALEXI: I refuse to speculate.

LORA: Say we're still in love. And everything's perfect.

ALEXI: And you're still putting out?

LORA: Jerk.

ALEXI: I guess... I mean as long as everything is great... I mean... Yeah, you know, we'd probably get married.

LORA: What if it happened six months from now?

ALEXI: Well, I guess the same.

LORA (serious): What would we have done if I *had* been pregnant?

ALEXI: Fuck, I don't know. I suppose we would have to get married. It'd all work out somehow.

LORA: Why would I have to be pregnant?

They KISS.

fin


LORA, for what she's worth, is the pivotal figure in all of this, and I think that I'll probably tell you a little bit about her as this thing progresses. First off:


26. This One Is For A Pregnant

Girl who never lived except in
The space of a week. I
Loved her, thinking up obscure and
Irritating priests where none belonged, finding
All sorts of cowls and cassocks
And collars and debts and anguished
And constant calls to duty and
Church and mankind, and then, the
Sails wide, the sea wild, I had this idea
To write virginity out a thousand
Million zillion billion times and hope
For the best, and, still, horses
Stared out of run-down fields,
And kidneys, houses, and rock
Wall walks guarded just about nothing,
Sure, there is something that does not like a fence,
But there are a lot more fucking things that just do not care.
I had the idea of shrinking this
Maybe-pregnant person into something that
Fit into a rally, or a
Code word, or a romance; what
A dead head, what a perplexed
God of sloth and lust and
Juice: the daylight was streaming in,
And my eyes saw stunned and
Ignoble nothing in a tardy teaspoon
Of red-brown fluid. Everywhere life goes on,
And it was all some obvious
Failure right from the start, the
Point made just long enough to
Stun me, and leave me mad
Enough to care from
Then to now, that it was
Nothing, and never would be again.
So?


And my final words on the subject more or less are:


326. The Next Suddenly Moving, But:

The light changes and you watch the bumper
Of the car in front of you slide ever
Closer; through the open window, you think
You hear Lora's voice, but you do not,
And the traffic's chirp unspeakably stills.
Surrounded by geometric blocks
Of concrete, washing lines and bright curtains,
You realize that one of these places
Was once your own, and then it shatters, fragments
Crumble into a dim space you once shared
With a slim someone you no longer know,
And with that memory, she becomes Lora too.
All that was thrives on all that is, you think,
But the light changes, and you have to move on.


352. The In Also Up:

The cat’s back legs twitched twice
And he crumpled forward onto his front
Paws as they gave way beneath his small weight.
The needle came out of the iv tube,
The vet said something and then said
He is gone, and that is pretty much all
I would like to remember; and in the recess
Of my imagination, in the mansion
You have occupied for so long,
I hear you say: but this was just
A cat, and I guess you are
Right, but I cried all the same,
More, if the truth be told, than the day
You left.


362. Amoretti Redux n

Written about but not wholly famous:
When you took that road
Of will and hid your world behind
Unpublished and pulseless freedoms,
Did archaeological sites
Appear in the margins of your life—
Populated by dull legions of dull graduate students,
Each eager to find new bones
And document the dregs of justifiably
Extinct civilizations—or did it all fail
And fall apart in crying, hopeless silence?
I guess it is not polite to ask;
The timing is all wrong, the ideas
Too slight and tired, and to tell you the truth, Lora,
I do not really care anymore:
I am writing this more out of courtesy
Than anything else.


I have this one, too, but I'm not putting it into Sonnet Sequence. I just don't think it has the right tone.

I Thought About You Last Night,

Or more to the point, really, I woke up with your name on
My lips. Okay, okay, I didn’t do that —
Nobody does that in real life, especially not after
Twenty years of trying to forget the feeling
Of a name marching across the tongue.
In reality, I dreamed that we slept together.
That was not a euphemism by the way.
In my dream, we really were just sleeping
In the same bed. Well, it was a little more
Complicated than that. I dreamed that
We took our two small and distant beds
And pushed them together, iron legs
Shrieking across a tiled floor. You passed me
A pair of rusty vise grips and a c-clamp.

I got down creakily on my hands and knees
And rooted around under the bed, making sure
That the two frames would stay attached.
We got undressed—I don’t think I looked
Over at you even once. We put on our nightclothes
As if nothing could be more normal. We climbed
Into bed, you on your side, me on mine—after so
Many years the same sides still. You reached over
And turned off the light. Goodnight, you said,
And then you swore about the neighbors who were
Running power tools late into the evening. Somewhere,
Because it was a dream, we must have found
Special sheets, extra stretchy ones, because the bed looked
Perfectly normal, as if it had been designed that way.


FINAL THOUGHTS

The only good part of the whole story is that it is because of LORA that I have never ever dated a student (she left me for an Environmental Studies professor, who, after all of these years, 18 years, is *still* a miserable assistant professor).

IN MARCH OF 1987
By the late 1980s, I was studying for a BFA in creative writing. After nearly flunking out of high school, and being kicked out of college, I managed to talk my way into the local university by appealing to the Faculty Senate for mercy. Bizarrely, they let me in and I started my studies. I found the classes to be difficult for two reasons: 1) I wasn't a very good writer; and 2) I had a hard time taking the sort of criticism that a person gets in a workshop. More or less, I was a big blubbery pussy about it, and it got to the point where I dreaded going to class. My poems were invariably the ones that got crumpled up and thrown across the room. True story.


The professor was Robin Skelton, a god of prosody and a first class witch. The author or editor of nearly 100 books, he was considered to be the best of the poetry professors even though he had never won a Governor General's award or a Commonwealth Medal or whatnot. Primarily, he was a craftsperson, and stressed metrics and structures. Not that he wanted people to write in formal verse, nothing could be further from the truth, instead, he wanted people to be properly trained, the way that painters used to be trained. First, it goes, a young painter should learn how to replicate nature, then copy the works of others, only then, it's argued, is a painter ready to create their own works. Skelton was always covered by a fine sprinkling of tobacco ash, and he had the habit of tearing up poems and sometimes even throwing them at their authors. He used to make some pretty harsh (but fair and true) criticisms, but also would take the writer of the best poem of the week out to the university's faculty club for drinks after class. Until I tried microwaving soup, that person was never me. I distinctly remember being pelted in the head by this poem:

Tea

tea should be
as amber
as bug stone tree sap
as painted cigar indians
as boiled cedar broth

tea should be
as sharp
as a woodwind progression
as clestial spheres
as a glass razor blade

In March of 1987, I was microwaving some soup at my parents' house. I made the mistake of tightly covering the bowl with plastic wrap and, sure enough, when I took the soup out of the microwave, the plastic wrap unexpectedly peeled back. Immediately, it felt like I'd been stung. I drew my hand back and looked at the microwave door. It was covered with what looked like three or four white strips of tracing paper: the skin from my right hand. I had about 30 seconds, I figured, to get going before it would start to hurt, so I ran for the car. I drove to the doctor's office (by the time I got there, I couldn't move my right hand, and had to shift and steer with my left). The doctor cleaned me up, gave me a shot, and wrote a script for some codeine pills. When I got back home, it was time to go to class, and being the hypochondriac that I am, I doubled the dosage and headed to class. When I got to class, things were so much better.


Regardless of how easy it became to handle criticism (back then, the other students could be pretty personal about it, and say things that no one would ever get away with saying in a class today), the real benefit was in writing. I remember the first time it happened, I woke up at one or two o'clock in the morning and the words just rushed out. It was like I was taking dictation. Unfortunately, the person I was taking dictation from was mostly unintelligible.

The resulting poems weren't very good, but it was a positive first step. The only drawback was that until March or so of 1989, I had a bit of a problem on my hands. I escaped pretty much without any lasting trouble. I never got arrested, never went to rehab, never even told any of my closest friends or loved ones (little Lora, bless her heart, never even figured it out) and although I still have incredible almost impossible cravings, I haven't acted on them for over 16 years. What follows are 3 fairly representative poems. I believe that there are 12 or so in all. Perhaps I'll post some of the others later.

In Medias Res:

And I fell asleep in the
Usual way, with the soiled
Shadows of the surface
Of the sea, a gasp of waves,
Two worn rocks, the waves lower further,
Then the underside of the sea, barnacles,
Mussels & one starfish, yellow, and

And I ran up the driveway shouting:
Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer, si
Forte, che come verdi ancor non m’abbandona, and
I dreamed Eros was saying: I loved her,
You know, I wasn’t just laying her.
I meant all those things. But then
He turned into a gasp of
Gasoline fumes and coughed twice, shouting:
Leave reality alone for a while, Bub, then
He exploded and eventually
Died. The dream drifted through graveyards,
In a sheet made of pounded
Bark and the breath of one
Infant, and it grabbed me hard, and
Shook me until Eros appeared in
A surprised whiff of ancient Greek
And vaporized semen. Eros goes on
For a while, then says again:
I loved her you know.

I’d like to think about driveways again later.

A and show then the
With its which is non-essentially open
To but the discipline of corded
Thongs on red welts always in
Silence. I can never remember the
Sick sound of the great drowning
In sleep.

Concrete walking without judgment
Along the paths which in the
Night are judgment. Passing the corners
Which lead to other corners: a
Prostitute watches while I show her
All the small but dying there
Is, including the mystery of never
Knowing why with whispers, raw and
Hand heavy over wide-spaced hips, but
Her space is everything, and all
The small but dying she sees
Are the recorded moans of rubber
Sheet melancholy, which, when cried from
The bathroom in July, only shows
How needed I am for the
Balance that will vanish eventually.

I’ll
Love you forever. I’ll love you
Forever.

The underside is all waves
And brown wood. The missing and
Their explanations gather between the breath
Of two struggling perceptions: brine and
Sand contact in foam and broken
Crabs, their shells red and thin.

And then there’s my father. And I
Have this dream that he’s under
A sheet. I pull back, because
There’s no stopping this progression, which
Will one day be lowered past
My horizon, and concealed by the
Grass, as cold as any stone.
So with respect to this dream,
I’ll give it a miss, and
Reminisce instead about electroshock, suicide and
All the other trivialities that have
Been done to death. There isn’t
Really anything that far from Yorkshire.
I know Daddy, or rather Pop, used to smoke
And drink coffee. The boys clocked
Him on the go at two
Decks of smokes and ten cups of joe by ten.
Brave man, he’s had a heart
Attack, but he loves butter and salt, might not
Smoke, but he’s getting old, and
Nothing can stop that.

And it all left
Me wondering how many others have
Said these things to each other.

An and remains un-implied by the
Breaking waves’ constant stroking: the two
Forces back away into rotting wood
Grain. The head of teredo sinks
And is gone, and the writing in
Beating ink, as incoherent as too
Particular trees (the two behind my
House, a fir, a curling peach,
Or the one by that park, misshapen
With disease, which rears itself like
Mould, yielding instructions and replications like
The steady drip of a water torture,
Administered from the opening of The
Odyssey to the frost, hoary) and
Spent. A man died yesterday, struck
From behind by a poorly structured epiphany, spun in circles by
The world, and he fell, turning
Into cold water and three migrating
Salmon, and they too will die,
As invisible as the distance between
The wood and its supporting water,
As visible as the hand that
Separates clams from non clams, anemone
From non anemone.

Today a gull
Got hit by a car. It
Was in the road with two
Other gulls eating something dead, and
A car came, and each gull
Tried to be the last gull
Eating something dead, and two gulls
Left and one didn’t, then the
Whole process started again, complete.

I was told he held down three
Jobs to get a ticket to
India. The plan was to hike
To the Himalayas and look for
Shangri La: a temple whose walls bled
When cut, but he ended up
In Mexico running drugs, and living
With three women in some guy’s
House on the outskirts of Mexico
City. Of course he was caught,
Cast into a Mexican jail, then
Reeled back across the border and
Into a hospital in Vancouver. He
Phoned my friend Gim [sic] and
Said: I’ve got to be a male
Nurse, because in 1990, at the
Time when the others arrive, they’re
Only taking male nurses, no women,
Because women explode upon entering hyperspace.
Now he’s better and even works,
But I always thought he was
Weird, and had too many tattoos.
He belonged to some group with
Handshakes and triangular meeting methods. He
Never read any of my thin
Poems. I saw him on the bus the
Other day and he said: hi.

And I heard voices through the
Ache of a distant ocean
Dream. The first said: happiness is
Traveling & meeting people. Canada’s leading
Circulation agency requires junior trainees. If
You are free to travel Canada,
Over 17 and bondable, neat and
Attractive in appearance, we may have
A fulltime job for you. But Lora
Said: fuck it, it’s a rip-off, don’t do it,
No.

There is no sound for the word
That describes any action less than
The motion of stones turned by
Waves on an August beach in
The pacific rim and no sound for
The sand that hides the crushed
Shells of sand dollars and the
Broken spines of urchins.

The first really said my
Throat was empty with the memory
Of Hiroshima skin pictures,
Postcards of flesh flaking into young
Hands. The second told me to
Reject and search, so I rejected
It all and looked, fumbled until
I reached with handcuffs a reality
I’d thought was finished. Sometimes
A dry thought passes for all.
The third said nothing
And realized I was awake.

The stars: I rolled over and opened
The curtains. The stars: I got
Back in bed and pulled blankets
From sheets. The stars: I pulled
The sheets over my head and
Stared nowhere. The stars: I held
My arms in my arms and
Waited. The stars: they stopped shining
In four simple words said long ago.

Sing in me, Muse.

After he spoke, he wrapped his
Shoulders in a leopard’s skin.
I stood there like an idiot
And waited and waited and
Nothing happened, though I ate well,
Followed the ritual exactly, shells and
Spines, two copper coins on my
Eyelids, salt and bread in my
Stiff hands, a lock of my
Lover’s hair and the first teeth
Of my soon dead skull, empty
Skull frame, maggot farm, refuge
Of whatever had been said. Then a voice showed

Me the street, the night, the
Quad where I spent three summers tanning
On stairs, the moon, the sun,
The lost feeling, the waist
I encircled then and the one
I encircle now. It led me
Into the night I wanted it
To be, and said: let’s leave
Well enough alone, let’s return to
Now. Both arms cold, I woke,
Trapped on my face, unable to
Turn, slowly breathing in my pillow.
I almost died until I remembered
My legs: why don’t we walk
Away more often, instead of always
Trying to use our hands?

A whole table full of verse and
This week’s cold was carefully stored
In blue Kleenex (crumpled by my
Hands and wet with strep virus).
Lora left me with strep throat,
Her friend’s copy of Death in
The Afternoon, a clock radio, an
Answering machine, and another nagging question:
Why isn’t there more space in
This world for formal attire? I
Have my tux, I have my
Tails, I have a pair of
Shoes so exclusive they look plastic,
So English that fog steams out
Of my breast pocket and wrinkles
My remaining blue Kleenex.

The surface
Of the sea, the underside of
The sea: there is no sound
So complete and so separate.

And again I drift off in my
Hollow black ship to sleep and
Walk on a tent strewn beach
With Odysseus and Diomedes, plotting to
Wake up, then mercilessly kick the
Living shit out of Achilles, and
Force the little bastard
To stay and fight, because in
Him are all our
Dreams, and the dreams of Briseis,
Also raped Briseis, quid thes abducta
Gravis Briseis.

We know well our
Parts, having heard them recited almost
Faithfully since the library burnt down. We know
How pointless it is for creatures
Of fate to actually try to accomplish
Anything meaningful is futile.

Portrait:

And Lora looked
Depressed, so I talked to
Her about tractor pulls:

We’re going
To take BC Place and turn
It into a mud pit.

I always loved
That line, that Homeric tag/flow: turn it into
A mud pit and fill it with two thousand pounds of
Axle tearing, mind blowing, bone
Crushing, earth shaking, tire spinning power,
And then a big voice imploring us all to:
Be there.

And she said: they
Serve warm beer. I hate beer.
I’m no good with drinks. I
Always spill them. You never trusted
Me, and that wasn’t right.

Damn.

And Lora became
Incoherent, started believing in
The most foolish things: UFOs, Yeti,
The Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, a
Common androgynous ancestor, psychic power, ghosts,
And finally God.

Yes, that streetlight’s
Transfixing me too, that one with
The black bird on top, not
That black bird, a crow, but

Not that crow: that crow died a
Little after God did, God, hands
Still sticky from woman (who was
Really the sea), God, hands still
Muddy from man (who was really
The earth). Are any gasps left?

Man killed crow, plucked him, made
A hat from his black feathers,
Beads from his black eyes, danced
Around the circle of his bones,
Ate him, then slunk guiltily off.

Damn.

Anyhow I tried to cheer Lora
Up with stories about Matsqui, Millhaven,
And finally St Johns. This is all from
A newscast I saw many years ago:
I gave him my

Children, and he betrayed me. He’s
Been doing it for years. They
Weren’t consenting adults, they were little
Boys. Now this is me talking in 1985: I went to the drug
Store today, honey, and, well, I
I love you, you know.

One:
Check the expiration date indicated on
The box. Two: detach the wrapper
Carefully, so as not to tear
The adjacent wrapper. Three: put a
Condom on penis as soon as
Erection is achieved, place against penis
Tip and unroll fully onto erect
Penis, keeping nipple end squeezed between
Your fingers so it contains no
Air. Air inside the condom can
Interfere with sensitivity, and may cause
Breakage. Four: do not attempt sexual
Entry without condom, as sperm are
Often released prior to ejaculation. Five:
After ejaculation withdraw, holding condom rim
To prevent spillage. Do not allow
Penis or condom to touch vagina.
After withdrawal, use a condom each
Time intercourse is repeated. Six: promise undying
Affection and love (I really do).

You know, 11 to 12 boys,
Well, 13 including me: they’d be
Drinking, a party atmosphere, but it would
Always end up the same way,
And I’d come home the
Next day, and they’d never question
It. It was planned perversion.

Pansy
Boys, come out to play, you’ve
Been cropped the Delian way. Young
Or old there’s room for you,

And room for roaming fingers too!
Hips and bottoms waggle away, pansy
Boys come out to play. Once
His lines were finished, he slobbered

A filthy kiss on me, then
He even came on the couch
And tried with all this strength
To pull my clothes off. He

Kept working away fruitlessly at my
Crotch, trickles of acacia pomade ran down
His sweaty forehead, and there was
So much powder in the wrinkles

Of his cheeks, that he looked
Like a peeling wall in a
Thunderstorm. The basilica of St John
The Baptist dominates the skyline, and

I thought: the head of New Foundland’s
Catholic Church sure wears a lot
Of black:

Black alack black clack dlack elack
Flack glack hlack ilack jlack klack mlack
Nlack olack plack qulack rlack slack
Tlack ulack vlack wlack xlack ylack zlack

I wake
Up into the nightmare. Some say
It isn’t real, they argue that in the public’s
Mind is the Holy Rosary and
Basic Catholic forgiveness and human nature; the priest
Is human like anyone else, he
Makes mistakes. There are times I
Tried to kill myself. Understanding
And forgiveness: that’s
What they’re afraid of… healing: that’s
What we’re talking about. Many of
These boys know other boys who…

It’s wrong. Twenty: and you must
Not give your emission as semen
To the wife of your associate
To become unclean by it. Twenty one:

And you must not allow the
Devoting of any of your offspring
To Moloch. You must not profane
The name of your God that

Way. At ten
I respected the priest. If he
Tells you to do something, then
You do it. Well, they didn’t

Understand. Why, why not run or
Give the guy a kick? For
Some reason my boys couldn’t come
To me and tell me. No

One is above suspicion.

Damn.

No no no no no no
No no no no no no
No no no no no no
No no no no no no
No no no no no no
No no no no no no
No no no no no no

Moonch, muunch, munch, let’s do lunch. I
Know this nice little Norwegian place
Three little pink oh no's from
Here. And I told Lora the
Car wouldn’t start, so we started
Talking about art. I told her
What it said to me that
Night I wrote the poem, and
I tried to explain the poem
Too, but it was too thin to
Support its merit, too fragile for
One reference, allusion, or Aristotelian trope,
And as for multi-syllabic schoolings, forget
It. I was forgetting something, so
Many unpublished thoughts… I didn’t remember,
But went on. Just play with
It, she said, don’t be too meaningful,
Don’t bore me with what I
Already know. What do I think, I replied,
I think Lowell used the word
‘Skunk’ because it starts with ‘s’.
I thought of that too, Lora said, but
Only for a minute, and even
To think of it
That long was a waste of my life.

I must do
More work. I must try. really
Try this time, I must begin watching more
Socially relevant TV, stop eating Kraft
Dinner® and start dining out, stop
Shaving, and after a lapse, start
Up again, this time for my
Career. I must wash my hair
With H2O2 until it is as
White as old verse. I must
Latch on to a beautiful young
Heiress, marry her and write Neo-Platonic
Verse with many Poundian devices and
Stylistic tics and die a decrepit
Old parasite, the breath of poetry
Long since foul (after too many
Years of the London Sunday Times
And Geraldo Rivera).

Right now, you
Are studying a poem, a multi-layered
Effect, whose first draft went from
Direct statement to non-personal interpretation, to
Third party quotation to personal interpretation to
Linguistic analysis, to imagism, to super-realism,
To data, deep image and babble.
It was indented according to these
Levels and the rules of grammar
Were abandoned one by one as
The poem tacked across the page.
I was pretty happy with it
Until Lora asked: is this
Meant to be seen, and then
I tried again with a poem
That went from verbal symbols to
Visual symbols, to recordings from radios
And images of still pictures, to
Images of motion pictures (imagine that
If you can), to television, the
Whole effect not just words, to
Displays, three dimensional and extensive, to a
Field trip through my processes, to
A direct demonstration, to a dramatized
Poetic experience, to a contrived poetic
Experience, to the writing of an
Actual poem. I wrote it as
A cone and named it Portrait.
I almost showed it to her,
But I remembered she hated art.

Damn.

And I told Lora that it did not
Matter. She should ignore all that noise we

Heard from the other rooms. We
Were in the National Gallery, trying

To study Titian while tourists
Mobbed Michelangelo, shouted nonsense,

And stumbled around like idiots.
Let’s go. And the robin

Is eating a worm, and the
Worm is still turning, and the

Robin hops across the mud, and
The worm is still turning. Schopenhauer

Sour dour, Schopenhauer sour dour, Schopenhauer
Sour dour. Lora, you look, excuse

Me do you mind if I
Stand, ridiculous with, it’s easier for

Me if I stand, that cigarette
Hanging, really I would rather stand,

Between your, no, really, let me
Stand, pursed lips, let me stand,

I want to stand, get up,
Move. She could out-argue me on

Metaphysics, so we never discussed metaphysics.

Damn.

And I used to ask Lora what
My identification was. I could never
Remember it myself. Do not mark

Your pin on your card, do
Not keep your card and your
Pin in the same place, e.g.

The bottom of your hat, an
Old lover’s name, or your heart.
Important, your personal identification number (PIN)

Is an electronic signature. To prevent
Unauthorized access to your account, we
Suggest you memorize your PIN and

Then eat this form. Do not
Divulge your pin to anyone.

5672

Damn.

The Anal Rape Of Castor And Pollux

It begins, so I suppose, in
1934 on page 4 with a
Cast of characters that includes many
Of the following words: the, sleuth,
Illustrates, face—all representing the track
Of the right hand of
The victim, whose coiffure
Was limitless tongues of
Blood and cultured pearls:
The pearls, my dear, were the words.

She never stopped talking. In
Him the youngest prettiest winter
Scared Syria from the Aleppo’s boards and
Stood only a few train cars
From the top of the page.
Dialogue or at least certain typed
Words manfully performed graceful phrases as
Polished as tensile even prehensile French:
Lieutenant Dubosc
Looked at the fat man and
Shivered in the cold.
Today, he said,
Is Sunday. Tomorrow,
He affirmed, would be Monday.
It was not the first time
He had made this observation.
Agreed, the man was an idiot,
And would be easy to fool.

The church of Saint Sophie in
Istamboul can be compared with eighteen
Well-chosen words from Arthur C Clarke’s
Little known novel Against The Fall Of
Night: there was no twilight
With the going of the
Sun. Night swept like a
Wind across the desert, [the
Lineation and terminal punctuation was
Purely the creation of the author
Who wished to reflect on
The punctuality of eternity] a
Cold wind came whistling down the
Platform. Five minutes later, approximately
Fifteen pages turned, and the passengers
Assembled on the train. Several
Personalities introduced some scandals and certain
French words were spoken. They were:
Voiture en monsieur voila erreur un
Avez vous que crois je
Monsieur bout a fait a
Tout monsieur monsieur la la
Monsieur comment [and, further,
An indistinct number of additional
Monsieur’s and a vieux mon precisement
Bien eh for good although
Backwards measure] and it went on.

The Hero refused to aid the ignorant
Yankee who was doomed to be
Ignobly dissected following a no doubt spurious
Reference to Balzac—whose many novels
Are apparently like the philosophic stage
Of a finely prepared meal, one that contains
The choicest morsels. Somewhere in there
The hero said elle est
Jolie—et chic but I do
Not like your face [or
So—this is from memory].

Monsieur demanded
A small bottle of Perrier! Monsieur
Demanded a small bottle of Perrier
Monsieur demanded a small bottle of
Perrier. Monsieur demanded a small bottle
Of Perrier [as several friends
Have just presented me with
A can of Diet Pepsi—
The choice of a new generation™—
(Whose catchphrase is most certainly
Protected) and a donut,
I shall rest momentarily from this
Composition].

Sometime in the past:
Picture this, a small Scottish
Village, rock, slate-roofed cottage,
Low bearing walls. The Calvinists
Proscribed such oaths as ‘sblood,
Zounds, by God’s teeth,
By God’s nails. The crown
Jewels, if I am being correctly
Informed, were being reconstructed mostly from
Somewhat fanciful memory about then.

He found it difficult to go to
Sleep. At once, it was curiously
Quiet, noises seemed unusually loud, footsteps,
Clicks, footsteps: why was the station
Outside so silent?! [for all
Of those who haven’t guessed it,
Ratchett is about to buy
The farm].

De l’eau minerale s’il
Vous plait de l’eau minerale s’il
Vous plait de l’eau minerale s’il
Vous plait de l’eau minerale s’il
Vous plait she will not listen
To reason, and as the snow withdrew and
Returned to the sky, common misfortunes,
Absent Hungarians and lo! the body was discovered!
Our hero said brr! And then he said,
This is serious.

Since there are two hundred
More pages in this novel and
I have no intention of reiterating
Them in this much detail,
I shall present a Dorian
Progression of sorts from a different
Book. Listen: in the corner
Of the first class smoking section in
Oakbridge station a little group
Of people outside was drawing
To a close the food dinner
Was a moment’s silence—a silence
Of there was so sudden
And so unexpected that it
[as with most arty sort of
Things the above experiment became
Boring only seconds after it
Was begun] no no no, our
Hero said, twirling the waxen points
Of his black moustache into the
Straightened throat of indisputable fact like
The tightly braided hairs of carefully
Manicured dogs, I grant it to
You, and I will pass over for
The moment, and then he says
Something sort of like everything goes
To show that that was so
[remember our hero had been
Cold and was now somewhat
Nasally congested]. For fever and cold
The doctor recommends carbonate of
Ammonia 2 drams, alum 1
Dram, capsicum dentian foreign colombo
Root prussiate of iron
All pulverised or each 1/2 dram
Mix by putting into a
Bottle adding cold water 4
Ozs one teaspoon every 2
Hours and so on, it’s hard to read.

For the bizarre logical precept
Nietzsche suggests we construct
A new world view, which we
See immediately with the aid
Of all the old experiences
Which we have had always
According to the degree of our
Honesty and justice. The
Only events are moral events
Even in the domain of sense perception
[which even to a layperson
Makes no sense whatsoever]. The novel
Ends a little later with our
Hero saying: having placed my
Solution before you, I have
The honor to retire from the
Case. After which the texts drifts
Off into the controlled infinity of
A terminated ellipses [needless to
Say nowhere in this text
Were Castor and Pollux anally
Raped, although if you want
To try, Dali did a
Sculpture that might suffice.

YOU MUST LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY

And I quote:

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk.

That was William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch. This book is one of the triumphs of literary genius, written by one of the last century's most gifted writers. Some people see the book as nothing but a vaguely connected narrative randomly created out of a fifty fifty combination of drug-inspired creativity and, well, drugs. Others see it for what it really is, a wonderfully written and carefully crafted work of literary fiction, an allusive text that deliberately tracks from Coleridge to the Exeter Book, exploring some of the most subtle themes in human imagination.

Unfortunately, when you're really high, relatively dumb and 16, it's the drugs that stand out, and oddly enough, it's common to think that you are William S. Burroughs, or worse, Hunter S. Thompson, or worse still, Hunter S. Burroughs. It's not so much the drug use that's the issue, it's the writing.

For god's sake, get high if you must, but stay away from the ink.

What follows next should be a warning to all. These are a sequence of poems written when I was between 16 and 18, back in the dark years of the early 1980's, from October 14, 1982 and early 1985.

100 Poems About Being Really Really High


1. I Wish

I wish, oh I wish
Oh I wish I had
an electric typewriter



2. A Pox On This

A pox on this
A curse on that
In event of fire
Fuck your hat



3. Short Poem VIII

If flashlights sang pure songs of joy
And garbage cans were fish called Koi
Then curtain rods and orange toast
Were called to London, or so they boast



4. Cowboy Boots Caked in Horseshit II

Howdy Doody
Last night's beer
Chuck it down
And fuck my ear.
Yee haw



5. Electric Typewriter

Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig

(repeat indefinately)



6. African War

The Boer War in Africa
Was a waste of time
With English men
And Dutch rebels
This poem doesn't rhyme or scan



7. Words

Cyclamates
soda-pop
books
tastee-freeze
Confederation
Cowboy boots



8. Growing Old

My eyes are growing dim
My body wasting thin
My hands are getting cold
My shorts are growing mold



9. Auuughhh II

Oh my good lord
The damn communists
Are in the streets
And the pencils are soaked
With cottage cheese



10. Algebra II

Numerals digits
rah rah rah
Algebraic operations
ha ha ha



11.Breadbox Calling Venus!

Hi Venus!!!
I'm a breadbox!



12. LSD

I'm in a tree
On LSD
Don't know what or where I'll be
In this tree on LSD
Won't you drop
Some trips with me?


13. Poor Last Line

Trust in lust
Or love like dust
That's wiped up by a cloth.

Perplexed with sex
Or what comes next
Thank god I'm not a sloth.



14. Polly Wanna Cracker

Awwwwkk!
Pieces of eight!
Pieces of eight!
Awwwwk!
Pretty Polly!
Pretty Polly!
Awwwkk!
Give Polly a fucking cracker!
Awwwwkkkk!



15. U R

U R
You Are
Why Oh You
Are



16. Battle Cry

Space Cadets...

AWAY!!!!!



17. The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad II

Sinbad sails both far and wide
With the wind against the tide
"But to where?"
He can't decide
So all he does is cough and hide.



18. Fish Pie

Candy fish
Dandy fish
Name of fish?
Mandy fish
What to do?
Pan de fish



19. Reality

I have this terrible,
Sneaking suspicion,
That my toast is buring
Yet again.
That would make it
Eight in a row.
Fucking toaster.



20. Hawaii Five-O Poem

Oh Jack Lord, I'm fucking bored
But I've got to watch your show
sword, gourd, moored, floored, toward, aboard, rabbit droppings



21. Periscope 6

Sailing down through seas of green
Diving deep to depths unseen....
Blub blub blub.....



22. Ducky

Oh I wish I had a duckie,
A nice little quacker.
To eat with nice orange sauce,
On a salty cracker.



23. Basketball Soup

Loop de loop
Through the hoop
I would like some tennis ball soup



24. Poem II

When you find yourself
Writing poetry
Merely to pass the time,
It's about time (get it) that you



25. Cowboy Boots Caked in Horseshit

Proud partner, I must say
One million acres of prime cut hay
At 4:30 I begin my day
And in my barn, my horse says neigh.



26. Knowing My Place

If God is here
And here is God
Then here I stand
On grassy sod.



27. Oat Cakes

Chomp.
Snap snap snap snapity
Snap
Bite
"Oh my god-damned teeth"



28. Poetries in Transverse

I'm on a spree
My work is free
All must see
These poems by me
The price is low
But I must go
To let some other people know



29. Dear Ralph

Oh, your dog's drunk
And your cow's sick
And your wife's left you
And I'm dead.
Yeah, yeah.



30. Just To Let You Know

A long time past
I had a dream
Of coconuts, strawberries
All unseen.



31. Initials Carved in a Dead Tree

Bark bark barked the dog.
Oink oink oinked the hog.
Walkity walk walked the ant.
Conversion of sunlight photosynthesized the plant.


32. Runner

Boom boom
Blast blast
Run, run
Awfully fast



33. Teddy Bear

Teddy Bear,
Oh my, where?
Who would stare
At a teddy bear?
Jelly bean,
who has seen?
Where has been
My jelly bean?



34. The Number 6 As Seen Through Tinted Glass

Up and away
To the far unknown
Under my pillow
Nowhere I roam
Out the door
Into the dome
I can’t find sword
So I use my comb



35. Writer's Block

A solid wall of contemptuous greed
Breaks my mind, releases my need
Blots out my thought without a care
writer's block, Tuna-fish
Meatloaf socks everywhere



36. The Meaning of Poems

Reader Reader
Don’t you quit
Reading my words
My words of wit
But when you read
Do you sit
Or, my reader,
Do you lit-
erature?



37. Quest For Faith

The quest for faith
ends at the start
For the trek begins
in a young man's heart
If the search is done
and the goal achieved
then a lack of faith
is not believed



38. New Pen

New pen, blue pen
Found at school pen
New pen, blue pen
For self rule pen



39. Hammer

Clang Bang
Love and Hate
Clang Bang
War and Peace



40. Yeah IV

Yeah * Yeah * Yeah * Yeah



41. Light Switch

Click on the light
Shine on the room
Get you mind up
Out from the gloom
Look upstairs
And to the right
And if you'll be good
It will be light



42. This Way No More

Stop it for Christ's
Sake. I can't take any more
Of this sentimental shit.



43. Clock Radio XX

Click clock
Dee dop
Buzz buzz buzz



44. Another Short Poem

I lost my face from my head
So surely I must be dead
I shot it off with a gun
Who said life was this much fun?



45. I'm Free!

I'm free, I'm free, oh I'm freeeeeeee
I'm free to be a servant of the lord!



46. Epic Marriage

Hello?
Hi.
Likety likety like like.
Love love lovety.
Sex!
Slap.
Divorce, divorce, divorce.
Hello?



47. Help!

Help help I'm sinking fast
My hopes destroyed, my mind aghast
But if I win this game of mine
I blame it on the God-damned slime



48. Band-Aid

Ump paw paw
la la la
ump paw paw
ha ha ha
ump paw zoooipp
fix fix fix
ump paw paw
ga ga ga.



49. A Sort of Short Poem

Ha ha ha and ho ho ho
Santa's sleigh is stuck in snow
Ha ha ha and ho ho ho
Really, Santa, I must go.



50. Pick up your soles

Pick up your blue shoes
Dance a little tap
Look around the dance hall
Then take a little nap.



51. Car

Oh I wish I had a car
A nice car car
A very nice car
Car car car



52. Hi

Hi I'm back
On a bit of smack
And a cup of very strong tea.
Please don't go
I promise I'll grow
Won't you pray for me?



53. Lines

Follow the curve
Of a gentle hip
Over an ample bust
To a painted lip
Through soft brown hair
Past bright blue eyes
The female mind
Is a strange disguise.



54. Fission

ZZZZZzzzzzz
pip pip pipity pop
zot top nob lop
pizzisssst bim bam
BOOM!!!



55. First Reply to Keats

'Twas a misty night in Equador,
The moon was full and bright,
The mists of evening covered all,
The gloom was quite a fright;
A jaguar pokes his head above
The wispy fog and mist:
Turns and stops, staggers, drops,
That cat was really pissed.



56. Gon't

Gon't won't
willn't non't
billfold
seaside
mystery
pon't



57. Blarrrrrr

Hopes crushed
Brains mushed
I'm blasted again
No more lust
Just vague mistrust
I've gone and gone insane



58. Angolan Spaceships

Blasting through a sea of green
Going softly, yet never seen
Not one place he's never been
Spyzowin Angola, tall and lean



59. Clock Radio Revisited XI

Clock clock on my wall
Correct timepiece not at all
If you stop I'll bust the FUCK out of you



60. Spider Plant I

Hanging there in my hair
Snarled and mean, just like a bear
Hanging down, to my crown
Standing in my underwear
I find a plant to whom I chant
Beezell, Beezell, Bo-lant lant
Tear you down? Oh no, I frown
I'd like to but I can't



61. Auuughhh III

It's hard enough
To think aloud
Or sympathize
With the common crowd



62. Trucker III

I'm a good fucking trucker
And a mean mother fucker
And boy, can I drive my rigs.
I'm a tough damn trucker
And a foul mouthed sucker
And boy I can BBQ pigs.
That's right.



63. The Colour Four

The colour four
The number blue
Nothing more!
Nothing new?
The number green
A shade of eight
Love leads to war
And peace breeds hate



64. Rage

AAAuughhhhhh..........
(totally wow like mega, barf-out)



65. Trucker IV

I'm a trucker
Proud and true
I'll drive my rig
Just for you
I'm a tough guy
Never blue, and
In my barn
My cow says moo



66. My head is full of swill

Christmas decorations
Bad taste in music
Small pieces of wood
Backgammon boards



67. Neat trade

A neat trade
Is kiss for rhyme
A psychopathic
Training.
The real world
Is a hole full slime,
With a gentle raining



68. Twitch

Twitch like you're dead,
And they'll think you're insane.
But twitch like you're insane
And they'll think you're stupid.



69. Typing

It may be interesting to note
That I never did
Get an electric typewriter
For more than a couple of days.

But you know what?
I think I may just have
Grown out of those
Sorts of urges.



70. Bug in Amber

I see that bug in the amber
And I compare it to myself.
Oh dead bug in the amber,
I bet you're just as fucking bored
As I am. Except you’re dead.



71. I'll be back in a bit

I'm sorry,
but I've got to desert you.
I'm watching the Murder on the Orient Express,
and I have to leave this shit for a while.
I hope that you don't mind too much.
thanks.......



72. Home Again

Hi! Ho!
I said aloud
Jumping out of bed
Good morning world
I told myself
I very nearly said
I need some food
To break my fast
I'm very glad to say
So have a merry life, my friend,
And take two of these per day.



73. Quote the Aardvark Not Again

In this big wide world of ours
I sometimes hear them say
"If bidding combs are alcoves"
Upon this very day
I'll watch them all gather 'round
And someday I just may
Destroy my home and wreck my life
But the horsie still says "Neigh"



74.I'll Kill You

Give me a knife
A blade or saw
I'll cut your legs off
Hee hee haw



75. Quote the Aardvark I

Inaction in action
A relaxing distraction
A twenty minute nap
Inaction in action
Relaxation sensation
Filling in the gap



76. Quote the Aardvark III

Soft warm blankets
Inaction in action
Heated mildly
Good for relaxing



77. Quote the Aardvark IV

A frustration of my mindless sleep
Distorts my very eye
The uselessness of that cruddy word
Could make a birdie die
If falls to earth so quick and proud
A feathered blue distraction
A small and very pointless case of
Inaction in action


78. Quote the Aardvark V

Inaction in action
A kind of toy to me
A simple way of rhyming nouns
Such as book and tree



79. Quote the Aardvark VII

Frustration
Creation?
Destroys the sensation
Commonly associated with
Decisive persuation
Inaction in action
As a form of distraction
Works remarkably well.



80. Quote the Aardvark X

Inaction.
In.
Inaction.
None but.
In Action.



81. Telephone V

(Off the hook.)



82. New Poem I

When I say this poem's new.
You have to believe me.
But I could be lying.
And you have to take that chance.



83. Advice II

When you read a work of mine,
Do not try to force a rhyme.
Read it slow, in step with time,
And look for words inside the line.



84. It's nothing seriously

Oh it's just nothing
Nothing hoping to be
A sort of empty-somewhere
A bird, a fish, a tree.



85. Poem On Crumpled Paper Two

Laugh, Laugh
Cry, Cry
Say Hello
Wonder Why
Ask a Friend
To Tell the Time
and Try to Make
a Poem rhyme
Ask Me, you know
I don't care
Sexy Girls in
Underwear



86. It's Just Another Day

Staring at the T.V set,
And lying on the floor.
Reading yet another book,
'cause writing is a chore.
Pouring tea out of the pot,
Into my tea-cup blue.
Sipping all the dark-brown drops,
These books are overdue.



87. My Wall?

My wall is so white.
So very white.
The white of virgin day-dreams,
and snowy doves.
So white.
So whitishly white,
so blazenly white,
it's green.



88. Commentry On Comments

Wishing is a futile thing,
Bringing only tears.
For wanting only makes us think
About our hopes and fears.
Wishing never changes life,
In fact it never nears,
For when you wish upon a star,
It could’ve been dead for years.



89. The thrill of hate

Hate's great!
Not a shade of eight,
But nice enough to please.

Lets go to war,
Or eat coleslaw
Please scrape off the cheese.



90. Innuendo?

Come to my house
And we'll have a fling
Because I've got a bell
That doesn't go "ding"
Just "Dong."



91. Ears

Ears can hear
And heart can fear
I was once gone
But now I'm here.



92. Acid Coma

Etherial clutch disk goat toast
Echo woodwind rump roast
Doodad uptown bedspread
Bogart horse shit brain dead.



93. The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad III

Sinbad the sailor
Escaped from his jailor
And fled into the night
He sailed to the east
In search of a feast
But but a horrible fright.



94. Colourful Death of Fashionable Girl

Strangled
By blue and white
Oyster juice Rice Crispies ™
She fell to the earth
In cloud of grey worm spit
And pink bunny fluff



95. Sausages with Egg

Small brown tubes
Slick and shiny with fat



96. Ceiling of Blue

Will house without roof ever be a home?



97. Girl in Suit

Sitting there
In the waiting area
Was a girl in a suit



98. Windows

Windows
Are
Wood-framed anywheres
With details too fine
For hand or eye.



99. Lizard

like a
like a
lizard

hissssss...
with forked tongue

and

bask in hot sun

to escape cold blood
blooded heritage



100. Deepsea

Under
The waves
Sandblasted landscapes
And outcrops of lava