Welcome to my poetry page. The 20 poems on this page have been selected from my poetry collection entitled "The Caterpillar" which will soon be published by Chipmunka Publishing, London. The darker poems examine depression, addiction, religious ambivalence, divorce, and family of origin issues. I hope anyone who has been through some of these sorts of ordeals can find some identification in these snapshots. My subject matter extends to lyric poems, love poems, and humorous poems as well. But even in my most personal poetry, I try to find an element of irony, self-deprecating humor, or the surreal, to lift the writing above the level of overwrought ventilating. My idols are Mark Strand, James Tate, and Leonard Cohen. This countryside
A dusty tinkling greeted me as Through which we walk Is no less beautiful For being only what it seems. Mark Strand I entered the antique store. A gray man sat in the back, picking wooden ABC blocks out of a pickle barrel and arranging them on his desk this way and that, until they shone like polished brass. I stood watching him for an hour and a half or so until it seemed opportune to interrupt. Excuse me, sir, I spoke, can you teach me this strange and marvelous art? Or perhaps I should ask to what sort of God should I pray to receive this mystical power? The ashen man did not look up from his work. "The gift of alchemy," he intoned, "is not given to ordinary men, but rather to certain doomed souls who wander the city, seeing metaphors in everything, until they are driven completely mad, unable to see anything for what it is." So saying, the burnt man rose up on his haunches, bared his fangs, and lunged at me with a roar like an incinerator. "I'm doing this for your own good," he snarled, and devoured me whole. TOP II: I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THIS WHEN I'M THIS WAY For Carol "Where is the center of the universe?" Corky, the meeting chairman, asked rhetorically. "When you miss the nail with your hammer," --he held up his thumb--
"This is the center of the universe!" I present my disemboweled self to you in rape-victim clothes and toothless smile, And serve up a generous helping of entrails, herb butter on the side, which you nibble like a food critic. You gather me in your Gaia arms and bury my face between your breasts as I wolf down great mouthfuls of comfort food like a prisoner of war. "I am a victim, too," you say, "but that can wait." And Pieta-like, admire my hair with rain-swollen fingers, and graciously accept the ceremonious gift of my consuming self-absorption. Your tongue caresses the bamboo shoots under my nails; you pour out your healing balm like a libation. I lie on my back, excavated, an empty husk. You place your hand in my side and I believe. You tell me I'm like your father, full of rage and whimsy, mischief and melancholy. You had never known another man like him. I do not care so much about being unique as being suckled. You give me a Monet postcard. You get my reference to "A Foggy Day." Our fathers both used to read to us from James Whitcomb Riley. "This is too much," I say. "Who sent you here?" I begin to laugh, to give. The world, no longer a kinescope, begins to unfold. You smile like a mouthful of canary, and ask me to sing. You knew, didn't you, once the pain abated, I, like Galileo, would emerge in a heliocentric universe, and, rising, become your sun. TOP The Walk Embalming fluid slithers through my veins. I part the sluggish air like a swaybacked draft horse. The downed leaves protest meekly underfoot. I envy them. They just let go of the branch and fall to earth and that's the end of it. They don't ponder the barrenness they left behind and say, "What have I done?" The don't stand in front of the candy rack for three quarters of an hour in agony, lest they buy the wrong one. If I must live in hell, why can't it be an honest one, full of fire and brimstone and ravenous, imperishable worms? Not this pusillanimous limbo, suspended between guilt and ennui, my papery skin turning jaundiced for lack of chlorophyll. TOP The TV to drive the ghosts away. Sometimes I don't even pay attention. It's white noise. But it's as necessary as light. If I turn it off, the blackness closes in, the voices start murmuring, the silent air becomes palpable. It's my campfire in the wilderness, keeping night predators at bay. I stare at the fire, shotgun at the ready, listening for the telltale snap of a twig. The phone rings. The machine takes it. I am safe again. Exhaling, I finger the volume button on the remote, to stoke the flames. TOP The Leisure Class The day it all came crashing down I was walking along the golf course fence. And suddenly my impotence erupted in a thrash of spleen. And there, underneath a canopy of cedars near the fourteenth green, years of humiliation, futility, and recrimination came spewing out of me In a cataract of salt water, snot, sobs and sputum, gaining intensity with every wail, like breakers, wave building upon wave. I have to keep moving, I thought. I tried to light a cigarette to stanch the flow, but it was like trying to cap a geyser of Oklahoma crude. I gave in to the torrent, finally, and stopped, leaned on the fence next to the cart path, and prayed no joggers would lope past while I cried, exuding salty fluids of a different sort, and notice me, or worse, not notice. Or worse yet, ask if I was all right without breaking stride. TOP Villain-elle I don't know who I'll be from day to day, A world-beater or a hapless lamb. I always feel like this when I'm this way. I limit my remarks to pleasantries For fear you'll find out who I really am. I don't know who I'll be from day to day. I smile on cue, take pains to meet your gaze, The better to perpetuate the scam. I always feel like this when I'm this way. I must be good lest I incur the lash. Thus my authentic self becomes a sham. I don't know who I'll be from day to day. Despite my pains, the lash comes anyway. He tells me I should take it like a man. I always feel like this when I'm this way. There is no there there, Gertrude Stein would say. I'm loved for what I do, not who I am. I don't know who I'll be from day to day. I always feel like this when I'm this way. TOP The Reckoning The plastic sack tantalizes on the futon, its open mouth the entrance to a shimmering white cave. It shines like a mermaid on a rocky spit, calling to me. I touch it with my paw. It speaks to me in a crackling language only cats can understand. I poke my head in. The handle wraps around my neck. I pull back, but the sack comes with me. I tear around the room like a shot. The sack flaps behind my ear like the wings of a falcon. The faster I run, the louder it gets. I zigzag furiously, but I cannot shake it. Its talons will sink into my flesh any second. This has been going on for six years. My weight is down to one and a half pounds. Suddenly my master tackles me and extricates my neck from the noose, petting me and cooing. It's been three months now since the last time I (as they say in the program) crawled into a bottle. They tell me I will be a cat for the rest of my life. TOP The Shrine It's a shrine now, the housekeeping room where I sobered up. There you can see the sink full of moldy plastic plates and jelly jars. Over here in the corner is the tangle of wires left behind when the burglars stole the stereo. And here, this empty enameled pot full of dry dirt used to contain the Mother-in-law's Tongue my sister gave me that Christmas. I loved that plant and I watched it die, like a Christian Scientist who doesn't believe in hospitals. It's been twenty years, but I still return to this shrine once a year, to hide under the bed and watch the tourists file through, taking pictures and clucking. TOP Rebuttal The world is teeming with clichés. And you tell me they don't belong in my poetry? Take the phrase "courting disaster." I courted disaster. Then I married her. For a few years, we lived in a Fool's Paradise, kept house, made babies, had Everything We Ever Wanted. Enough clichés to Choke A Horse. I had married, it turned out, a Ticking Time Bomb full of Dirty Little Secrets. And when they Came Back To Haunt Her-- the incest, the rape, the abortion, the tricks turned for heroin-- she tried to starve herself to Within An Inch Of Her Life. And I found myself Living With A Stranger, being dragged down with her into the Terrors Of The Damned, until I had to move out to Save My Sanity. It was supposed to be temporary. Now I'm a cliché. Every other weekend I take the kids to the amusement park, shower them with trinkets, stuff them with Happy Meals. I do it to buy their affection, assuage my guilt, make it as anticlimactic as possible when they go back to Mom's. It's called being a Disneyland Dad. I may be a cliché but I'm trying to be the Best Cliché I Know How. TOP The Weapon
Her stubbornness squeezes me
like wet ropes. You might as well carve obsidian arrowheads with your spit as negotiate with a six-year-old. First it was "Let me finish my juice!" Now, the bus two minutes away, it's "I don't want to go to school!" An explosion severs the brittle air, like lightning hitting the ground a block away. Hollow-point words shatter her isinglass armor. There is a bomb crater where her face used to be. By the time she gets off the bus, she will have forgotten it like a summer squall. I will spend the rest of the day smelling like gunpowder. TOP III: CORPUS DELICTI Dark Jesus I am in a coliseum waving my arms, shouting gibberish and swooning in the Spirit. I have a vision of the face of Jesus with eye sockets like Black Holes and pupils of distant white stars. This can't be right. My Jesus is warm and fuzzy. I shake it off like a St. Bernard coming in out of the rain. I am in a holding cell. Matrons in Italian suits reach into my body cavities and confiscate my house, my children, my bank account. I am forced to watch as great red blotches devour my kid brother's flesh. In another room my wife is screaming. Butchers disguised as college professors are sawing open her skull. They show me a film. My pastor and his assistants are passing around a male whore. A portrait of my son hangs over the mantle. His forehead is wreathed with hypodermics. They shine a light in my face. They teach me words like AIDS-related dementia suicidal ideation binge and purge incest liberal visitation I am a better man now. My Raggedy Jesus doll is in a box in the attic, the succor of easy truth sucked into the infinite gravity of anarchy and betrayal. There is no God only my Dark Jesus with his stare cold as deep space inviting me in TOP Übermensch I "This wine does not please me," Jesus said. "It is cheap and bitter, like gall." And Mary said, "So do something about it." So Jesus said to the servant girls, "Go, fill those jugs up with water." Which they did, and the rest is history. Jesus' first miracle. A parlor trick. And so the masses flocked to him, clamoring for more tricks, like he was Houdini, or David Copperfield. And when they didn't get them, they threatened to throw him off a cliff. That's when he pulled one of his greatest tricks ever, walking through that homicidal mob like a hot knife. And what about the time he killed that fig tree because it wouldn't give him any figs? Raising the dead, making the blind see, that makes sense to me. Killing a tree? What is that? Then he says to his disciples, "You can do better tricks than this if you have enough faith. You can make mountains throw themselves into the sea." I can't believe they bought it. II I had a lousy morning this morning. My six-year-old tried to run away. I ran out of cigarettes. My twelve-year-old scolded me for waking her up with my screaming. Did you abandon me because I wrote that blasphemous poem last night? Am I just another fig tree to you? III Jesus, I think you are a metaphor for God. And I'm one of those earthen vessels that Paul talks about, full of washwater which you turn into Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. Already I am being poured out like an after-dinner coffee. In the parable of the fig tree, the vineyard owner gave the nurseryman another year to make it bear fruit. Jesus, I am struggling with this. And I have come up with a moral: "If you're looking for mercy, it is better to be a whore or a thief on a cross than a barren fig tree." No, that's not it. "Do as I say, not as I do." No, that's not it, either. IV "This wine does not please me," Jesus said. "It is cheap and bitter, like gall." And he refused to drink it. No more parlor tricks up his sleeve. Deserted by his public. A few hecklers hanging around the cross, waiting for just one more trick. "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" There's nothing more pathetic, the centurion said, than a man whose art has deserted him. And uttering a loud cry, Jesus gave up his spirit. This was to fulfill the prophecy of Nietzsche, who said "God is dead." And the earth quaked, the graves opened, the temple curtain was riven in two from top to bottom, and Adolph Hitler invaded Poland. TOP Perpetual Adoration
I look around the dingy cigar store to make sure no one sees me. The bent little clerk in the Roman collar takes my money. I grab the magazine, slip it under my raincoat and hurry out the door. Safely at home, I slide my prize out of its slipcover and................open it. A holy card falls in my lap. I flip to the center-........................... fold and turn it sideways. There, in all its airbrushed..............................glory, is the Monstrance from the Basilica of Saint.........................John Lateran. I gaze at it worshipfully, trying to ignore..........the staple which damnably is
located right in the middle of the Sacred Species. I stare at it for an hour, chanting "Jesus I adore you in the Blessed Sacrament." The phone rings. The voice at the other end says, "I'll take over now." I close the magazine, slip it back into its sleeve, place it under my pillow and sleep like a baby. The Nativity The yellow fog wraps around me like damp fur. I search the pockets of my overcoat for some gloves, but find only an envelope. I open it and read: "You will slouch toward Bethlehem. You will whimper." I stand at the door and knock. Gabriel the Bouncer opens the slit and examines my stigmata. "You'll have to check your Breviary," he says. I enter the cathedral and genuflect. The waitress with no arms places a napkin on my writing-desk. "India ink," I say, "straight, no chaser." I unzip my fly, dip my penis in the ink. My first grade teacher glares at me as she adjusts her wimple. The bell rings. I kneel at the rail. Father O'Malley stands in front of me and brandishes the Host. "Corpus Delicti," he says. He places it on my outstretched tongue. The acolyte in the hockey mask holds a machete under my chin. I pant with joy and salivate. I return to my desk, falling down three times. Angels ride up and down escalators of sunlight as I caress my Underwood. I pound out Cantos with my hooves, braying Salve Reginas and Pater Nosters. Gabriel throws me out for disturbing the peace. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood. They both look exactly the same. "Some people do go both ways," says the Scarecrow. I lie down in the middle of the crossroads and curl up into a ball, weep, wait to be born and swaddled. TOP IV: I JUST HAVE TO PERFECT THE TECHNOLOGY Reeder Beach
Long before there were Swim Worlds with their giant slides and wave machines, we'd journey to Sauvie's Island, give Mr. Reeder three dollars, and trudge through the curtain of cottonwoods to the river channel, a poor man's beach, if you will, the kind with no dunes or driftwood, where the sand is rough and oily, and you can see the opposite shore. Sometimes we were graced with seagulls, though. My father would say there must be a storm at the coast. We helped mother lay out the picnic on the narrow sand, no worries about the tide coming in, and changed into our suits underneath the blanket. Gorging ourselves on tuna sandwiches and Kool Aid, we waited for a ship to come downriver. Spotting one a mile upstream, we stared intently into the haze to see if it was getting bigger or just moored in the middle of the channel. It's moving! I shouted. We tore down to the water to build our sandcastles right next to the lapping of the Columbia. An eternity passed as we raced to fashion parapets, surround them with moats, dig canals running from the moats into the river. The rusty, rumbling edifice loomed over us now, bigger than a school bus-- no, bigger than school! We stared in awe, soaking in the size of it. When the freighter was a couple of jetties downriver, the wake arrived, poor man's breakers, if you will, and we tumbled into the six-inch surf gasping in mock terror, as if we would be sucked out to sea. The castles! my sister cried and we ran to them like a gaggle of ducks to watch the tsunami surge through the canals, melting our medieval fortresses in a miniature ecstasy of divine power. When the sun touched the tops of the trees, we'd pull on our sweatshirts, dump the ice water out of the styrofoam cooler, and trek back to the car, the river disappearing behind the woody veil like a rabbit under a silk kerchief, and ride home in father's warm back seat, nestled in the glow of our mild sunburns like electric blankets. TOP The Body The sheriff shunts us into the left lane. A knot of brown uniforms compares notes, or maybe football teams. Half a dozen squad cars line the road, not one ambulance. "Don't look!" my companion says. My eyes lock in on it, prone on the asphalt, wrapped in a white linen snood. Among the prowlers, a twisted hulk teeters, listing in the ditch, a ghost ship keeping lonely watch over its dead captain. We glide by within arm's reach, protected by auto glass from the smell of death. Driving home through the forest corridor, lost hubcaps dangle on reflector posts like scalps. TOP Ambivalence
We are watching TV. My distraction is my gift to you. I noodle on my guitar. My improvisation is my gift to you. I'm happiest doing This riff is my gift to you. two or three things at once. My ambivalence is my gift to you. I can serenade you This chord is my gift to you. while I'm ignoring you. The space between us is my gift to you. My fingers pour out my soul This song is my gift to you. while I try to catch a glimpse A gift from my subconscious. of Rachel Ward's nipples. A gift from my automatic self. You see the beauty of it? TOP Hai Tech The Vacancy The vacant house
sits on the vacant lot, vacant, that is, except for the vacant house and a dead fir tree in the back yard, a vacuous back yard if ever there was one. The vague landlord shows me the vacant rooms: an ivory bedroom, a varnished vanity. His vapid wife runs a Hoover over the vast carpet, her vagrant eyes vacuuming up vermin. "I will fill the vacancy," I announce to the vague landlord. "I will vacation inveterately, sip vino on the veranda, and compose voluminous odes to valiant veterans, inspired by this napalmed noble, vanquished by the vicissitudes of suburbia, yet still erect, defiant, like the flag at Iwo Jima, a Wagnerian Valkyrie hovering over my vacuous Valhalla, its wizened arms and withered needles pointing at me like a burnt orange Jacob Marley, a violent, ever-vigilant emblem of my ongoing death!" The landlord gives me a vacant stare and asks me to vacate the premises. TOP V: ITE MISSA EST Rondeau Redoublé
Beyond all sense, wihtout a shred of pride, We gild ourselves with failure's residue. We court disaster, play at suicide. We love the rush of rising up anew. We rule our self-contemplative milieux Like lonely peacocks with our tails spread wide, Adoring our stigmata on prie-dieux, Beyond all sense, without a shred of pride. When hubris fells our grandiose designs, We nurse our guilt and take it as our due. We Hindenburgs, we'd rather burn than fly, And gild ourselves with failure's residue. Beset by ghosts we cannot listen to, We drown our brain cells in formaldehyde, Until when even liquor will not do, We court disaster, play at suicide. The privilege of having almost died Lets us see life as others seldom do. We carry like a badge our death defied. We love the rush of rising up anew. We plumb our depths for all the world to view, Exploit this metaphysical thrill ride, Until we resurrect one time too few, Too-kindly Fate imposed upon and tried Beyond all reason. TOP |