The Jerk by Jeffrey McDaniel

[smilezthief.livejournal.com]

Hey you, dragging the halo-
how about a holiday in the islands of grief?

Tongue is the word I wish to have with you.
Your eyes are so blue they leak.

Your legs are longer than a prisoner's
last night on death row.

I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtub
and nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski.

You're a dirty little windshield.

I'm standing behind you on the subway,
hard as calculus. My breath
be sticking to your neck like graffiti.

I'm sitting opposite you in the bar, waiting
for you to uncross your boundaries.

I want to rip off your logic
and make passionate sense to you.

I want to ride in the swing of your hips.

My fingers will be digging up in you like quotation marks,
blazing your limbs into parts of speech.

But with me for a lover, you won't need
catastrophes. Because the same things that
attracted me in the first place,
will ultimately make me resent you.

I'll start telling you lies, and my lies will sparkle,
become the bad stars you chart your life by.

I'll stare at other women so blatantly,
you'll hear my eyes peeling.

Because sex with you is like Great Britain:
cold, groggy, and a little uptight.
Your bed is a big, soft calculator
where my problems multiply.

Your brain is a garage
I park my bullshit in, for free.

And you're not really my new girlfriend,
just another flop sequel of the first one,
who was based on the true story of my mother.

You're so ugly I forgot how to spell!
I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test.
And break your heart just for the sound it makes.

You're the this we need to put an end to.
The more you apologize, the less I forgive you.

So, how about it? You, me, and a bucket of cafe ole?

John Berryman, Dream Song 66

[inertiam.livejournal.com]

Dream Song #66

'All virtues enter this world:')
A Buddhist, doused in the street, serenely burned.
The Secretary of State for War,
winking it over, screwed a redhaired whore.
Monsignor Capovilla mourned. What a week.
A journalism doggy took a leak.

against absconding coon ('but take one virtue,
without which a man can hardly hold his own')
the sun in the willow
shivers itself & shakes itself green-yellow
(Abba Pimen groaned over the telephone,
when asked what that was:)

How feel a fellow then when he arrive
in fame but lost? but affable, top-shelf.
Quelle sad semaine.
He hardly know his selving. ('that a man')
Henry grew hot, got laid, felt bad, survived
('should always reproach himself'.

       -John Berryman

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

"They Dream Only Of America"

They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."

And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ash tray is more easily—
The lake a lilac cube.

He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before

We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.

Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.

"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.

And I am lost without you."

- John Ashbery

Tony Hoagland

[birdcages.livejournal.com]

The Gaiman poem someone earlier today reminded me of a poem I read in a review a few days ago (except in a very vague/roundabout way), so I thought I would share it.

Hostess

All I remember from that party
is the little black dress of our hostess
held up by nothing more
than a shoestring of raw silk

which kept slipping off her shoulder
-- So the whole time she was talking to you
about real estate or vinagrette,

you would watch it gradually
slide down her creamy arm
until the very last moment
when she shrugged it back in place again.

Oh the business of that dress
was non-specific and unspeakable
and it troubled all of us

like the boundary of a disputed territory
or the edge of a borderline personality.
It was like a story you wanted to see
brought to a conclusion, but

it was also like a story stuck
in the middle of itself, as it kept on
almost happening, but not,
then almost happening again--

( The rest of the poem... )

"How Beastly The Bourgeois Is" by D.H. Lawrence

[gladiolishaker.livejournal.com]

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of a greater life
than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

The Time Around Scars - Michael Ondaatje

[cafebum.livejournal.com]

Because I just bought The Cinnamon Peeler, which is lovely.
--------------

The Time Around Scars
by Michael Ondaatje

A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.

And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occured between us.

At the Back of Progress

[pacweebles.livejournal.com]

the poem 1927 posted combined with that enticing debate about misogyny reminded me of this one.
[incidentally, for people that think Neil Gaiman is in fact misogynist and that it wasn't satire or that he's capable of such freethought, should read this, written as commentary to PETA.]
now, to the poem.
( this is by a Bangladeshi woman named Taslima Nasrin, translated by Carolyne Wright )

Dorianne Laux

[rekedar.livejournal.com]

From her book Smoke. "Family Stories"

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.

Sylvia Plath . Love Letter

[insidiousintent.livejournal.com]

Love Letter

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just toe me an inch, no --
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter --
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chiseled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I saw was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in a dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stemps of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

-- Sylvia Plath