Here is one of the poems I’ve been feverishly composing on my phone:
Belongings and Warnings
The gear in their lives has a strange impermanence.
Not because you get the feeling they can always replace it.
They can
They will
It is the whimsical attachment they forge
Between themselves and their things
That means less than nothing, less and less
Less than even the functions the things are made to perform
Bottled bottles and capped caps
That don’t carry water or cover heads
Splashed belongings of multiple values
Layers of colors, textures, depths and wealths
Parfaited in a life of conspicuous plenty
Serving functions that no longer exist
Then one day a rumor from a magazine
Picked up by a website too mighty to ignore
(Its offbeat the surfers control bricks of credit cards)
A local tv show repeats the warnings
A thirteen syllable polymer had been caught leaching
Out of twenty six of yogamagazine’s top ten products
In amounts traceable by 30 million dollar microscopes
In lab conditions reproducible on three of the outermost planets.
In their overstuffed home, layed out on chemical lawn
The layers of belongings, merge together
Under the unseen pressure of their belongings
Making extraction of particular elements hard
Granmaster Flash and the Furious Five. 1982. The Message. 12-inch single (Sugar Hill SH-584).
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs,
You know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, I can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkie’s in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far
Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car
Chorus:
Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to loose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder
How I keep from going under
Standing on the front stoop, hangin’ out the window
Watching all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes blow
Crazy lady, livin’ in a bag
Eating out of garbage piles, used to be a fag-hag
Search and test a tango, skips the life and then go
To search a prince to see the last of senses
Down at the peepshow, watching all the creeps
So she can tell the stories to the girls back home
She went to the city and got so so seditty
She had to get a pimp, she couldn’t make it on her own
It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from goin’ under
My brother’s doing fast on my mother’s t.v.
Says she watches to much, is just not healthy
All my children in the daytime, Dallas at night
Can’t even see the game or the sugar ray fight
Bill collectors they ring my phone
And scare my wife when I’m not home
Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station
Me on King Kong standin’ on my back
Can’t stop to turn around, broke my sacroiliac
Midrange, migraine, cancered membrane
Sometimes I think I’m going insane,
I swear I might hijack a plane!
My son said daddy I don’t wanna go to school
Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a Fool
And all the kids smoke reefer,
I think it’d be cheaper
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper
I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet
Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps
Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny
You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey
They push that girl in front of a train
Took her to a doctor, sowed the arm on again
Stabbed that man, right in his heart
Gave him a transplant before a brand new start
I can’t walk through the park,
‘Cause it’s crazy after the dark
Keep my hand on the gun,
‘Cause they got me on the run
I feel like an outlaw, broke my last glass jaw
Hear them say you want some more, livin’ on a seesaw
A child was born, with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he’s frowning too
Cause only God knows what you go through
You grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way
You’ll admire all the number book takers
Thugs, pimps, pushers and the big money makers
Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens
And you wanna grow up to be just like them
Smugglers, scrambles, burglars, gamblers
Pickpockets, peddlers and even pan-handlers
You say I’m cool, I’m no fool
But then you wind up dropping out of high school
Now you’re unemployed, all null ’n’ void
Walking around like you’re pretty boy floyd
Turned stickup kid, look what you done did
Got send up for a eight year bid
Now your manhood’s took and you’re a may tag
Spend the next two years as an undercover fag
Being used and abused, and served like hell
Till one day you was find hung dead in a cell
It was plain to see that your life was lost
You was cold and your body swung back and forth
But now your eyes sing the sad sad song
Of how you lived so fast and died so young
In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.
I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.
“Queens Boulevard Driftwood” A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens
Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer
The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River
The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology
Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out
Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos
Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam
Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by
Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency
When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass
The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths
Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter
Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built
By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood
This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.
So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:
As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments
I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains
That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched
Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent
Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures
Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)
In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs
Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”
At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of
As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum
Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires
He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate
Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet
There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls
Read ’til the end, where you get the payoff: For of all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: “It might have been!
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go:
And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.
A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, “It might have been.”
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall; For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!“
So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.
I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.1 This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)
The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.
(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)
Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:
Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?
Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.
It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.
It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.2
Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)
So the movers are packing away and Linda is away at the other apartment cleaning and accepting deliveries of new furniture. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes often said. Things are happening fast and I’m not sure how much I can write here. I am useless now that I’ve washed the dishes and tightened the cheap Ikea chairs that are always falling loose. There is a feeling of impotence that accepting (or paying for) help causes. I want to have meaning in this whole process which I don’t seem to feel just paying for it. I am too 19th century. I feel like if I don’t put my shoulder to the wheel in this move I am not actually helping. Of course that is ridiculous because Linda and I are the “first movers” of this whole show. These three strong Latinas would not be here if we were not paying for them to be here.
It is strange having people in your house touching all of our stuff. Now I don’t know these women in our house singing away to the popular music they have thumping from our boom box as they yell questions and comments back and forth. I guess this adds to the strange feeling of helplessness that I feel not helping. Here are three total strangers doing what in the past only our dearest (and most willing) friends had done. But they are not Richard Heller, Joel Stanger, Trevor Turner, John Mercer, or any of my Berkeley friends who helped with the last three moves. Interestingly the last move here we were helped by Miss Misti H and the one two moves ago involved Dennis Wolf. Both of those people are out of reach to me now and I am sad that they have been replaced by paid professionals.
Neither am I participating physically (no heave-ho), nor am I intimate with the workers. I am slipping out of my life during this move. In this journal, a sign of my increasing alienation from my life, I am recording my increasing feelings of alienation from my life. The skrittch of packing tape sounds like fingernails on the blackboard of my life as I sit in a house with people working incredibly hard as I sit here and diddle on the computer. I guess the root of it is that I am uncomfortable with and unused to my new status as bourgeois middle class sub-gentry (I can’t even own up to the fact that I am indeed a well paid middle class professional with a post graduate degree and a good union job [I'm prayin' for tenure]). I want to live in my imaginary hey-day of a working class youthful messenger. Sigh. If it was that good I’d have never gone to college.
If I insist on continually romanticizing my youth I will always be unhappy, looking over my shoulder at some thin hungry horny bachelor. The truth of the matter is that he was miserable and empty. I was lonely and bored except when I was misbehaving and in grave peril. The life I fantasize about was the life of a young man with few coping skills and a lot of misused down time. I guess I should be proud of one thing. When I was bored, lonely and venal I at least painted and wrote and some of those drawings and writings still exist. Two moves ago, from one place in the village to another I went through my “archive” and looked at lots of my letters and paintings (that wasted time alone justifies the cost of this packing). Up in the attic are two huge tubes of my work from the early 1980s that are testaments to the fact that there might be something to this nostalgia thing. But if you count out how much time I’ve lived and subtracted the time I “created” you’d still have each and every waking hour of a misspent youth.
So I think, against my better judgment I’ll post this now because I’m tired of writing.
When I was trying to stay out of the packers way I thought of a poetic way to characterize our move, but I think I’ve lost it: “from the intimate proximity of the gardens to the phallic modernity of the Big Six. ”
We’re moving tomorrow and I found two poems I had written that I thought I had keyed in. I’ll key ‘em in now. The first was about the shy young woman I saw heading to Aviation HS one morning. Refined and restrained, though she was obviously one of the kids, she seemed apart.
Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet
High school phalanx / A boisterous wedge
Tumbling Down / Off the concrete EL
Unapproachable / In stylized youth
A garden of / Performed individualism
Petals and thorns / Of hidden beauty
Instant adolescent / Fauna wilderness
In the rigid / Individualism
Is a patch of / Conformity
We’re all sad and scared about moving. I’m nervous as hell. I’ve been snapping at the kids and crabby with Ms. L. We love it here and I want to spill my guts about it, but I found these poems instead, so I’ll post them and see where it leads.
