you may have to squint

Here is the promised Christmas poem. What it lacks in joy, it adds to hope. You may have to squint to find it, but it's there--in the postman's hand, in Santa's poise, in the silver-glitter she'll have to shake alive.

Furthermore, what's a Festivus without some grievance?

Ciao for now.

The Snowglobe

The snowglobe settles slowly

Into the townscape. She watches

Fretful for the postman

Caught in the storm. And what’s worse . . .

Caught in the glass—perpetually drowned.

She saddens. She shakes the globe.

For the movement of it. To stir the foam bits,

Frenzy the weather vane

On the farmhouse down the lane.

The postman holds a letter.

From the farmer’s son, off to war? For the wife,

Who’s worrying the hens just now?

The snowglobe settles bleakly

Into the townscape. She sips cocoa,

Tongues a marshmallow and sucks it gone.

The firehouse is red. The firetruck

Is red. There are no fires.

She saddens deeper.

She shakes the globe.

For the wonder of it. What will become

Of Santa astride the icicled house

—brick like hers back when—

Or of the gifts in the chipmunk-

Cheeked, velveteen sack?

The gift for the postman—a new pair of boots.

The gift for the wife—a basket for eggs, this time

With a handle. The gift for the weather vane—

a buffer for the verdigris.

She has her own gifts. In the attic,

Hidden. That soon she’ll wrap with last year’s

Paper and this year’s tape.

She will gladden

As she scissor-blades the ribbon into curls,

As she marks the cards with a silver-glittered pen.

But just now it’s far too sad—the cobble

And the fences lined with crows.

Too immediately terrible—the drowning

and the blizzard and the always of it all.

slush-piles and derreire-mistletoe

Tis the season for rejections. The weather outside is frightful. Jack Frost is nipping at my nose--which is creepy and rude. And everyday my snail mail box or its electronic great-great-great-great grandbaby are stuffed with rejections from literary journals like so much undeliverable North Pole correspondence.

Why so cruel in these joyous times? Academic calenders. Time-crunched MFA candidates with their own stories and poems coming back like just-thrown message-bottles not heartily-heaved enough into the azure horizon. (FYI, aspirants, the adjective "azure" is frowned upon by the MFA establishment as having run its poetic course from gorgeous to cliche: an acceptable usage, however, is ironically (not literary irony, per se, more like hipster irony--eg. check out this wicked fedora, I scored it off a homeless dude in exchange for my Droid . . . oh, crap, wait . . . BRB) as I have used it above.)

Having done a stint in literary arts editing, I am familiar with the routine. Submissions are handled as follows:

[a] Immediate rejection after a quick scan for words like "azure" and "ironically"

[b] Eventual rejection after a round-robin gauntlet-slap from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial misgivings, a concurrence typically correlated to the underling's abnegation of self-reliance vis a vis the overlord's presumed omniscience.

[c] Immediate acceptance after a quick scan for phrases like "in the fetid aftergrime of human sex . . . " and "more than that, no, more than anything, Catriona hoped for the moonbird to land and splash in the bath of her plain blue eyes."

[d] Eventual acceptance after a round-robin chin-stroke-pensive-nod-fest from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial intrigue--see above explanation of concurrence.

[e] Belated rejection/ acceptance after languishing for 5 months in a slushpile of equally unstunning pieces--neither so malodorous as to warrant an unceremonious disposal forthwith (Aspirants, do not send you're only copy of unstunning work) nor so transcendent as to warrant a personal phone call to the author, ASAP, before s/he receives an offer from a more immanently prestigious institution. (Aspirants, delusion is a valuable trait--always include your phone number in your cover page.) After those 5 months, i.e. The Epoch of Ignominious Oblivion, the editor-in-chief informs h/is/ers genre editors that the journal is too skimpy in its present state and will need to be stuffed from the slush-pile as a petite filet mignon is plated beside a steaming pile of smashed-cheesy-starch to make the meal seem more substantial. Another round of assisted reading proceeds, this time with more exaggerated moans at the truly insipid and more hysterical laughter at the inadvertently humorous, until, at long last and with final-exams impending, the staff settles begrudgingly on the remainder. For the deigned-upon--an exuberant email overstating the journal's honor of publishing your work. For the failure-to-the-last--a prefabricated post-card overstating the journal's distress at having to pass on your worthy piece and/ or pieces of prose and/ or poetry . . . Sincerely, Current Editor.

So yes, tis the season. I'm like Santa . . . publishing entities line up to sit on my lap and tell me what they do not want for Christmas: my worthy piece/ and or pieces.
And they tug on my very real beard and scamper off into the jollity of the teeming mall and I call for the next in line and daydream of hanging mistletoe above my ass for the behoof of all and for all a goodnight.

Happy Holidays, my friends. Thanks for following along in 2011. Next week, I'll post a Christmas poem. And after that and after that . . . who knows.

outside in gambols

Here lies a confessional piece. I wrote it last year sometime to commemorate an epoch of literal powerlessness in my life. Before I wrote this poem (as indicated in the first two lines) I had written very little in the way of direct acknowledgment of my on again off again struggle with incapacitation. Since I wrote this poem, I have written more freely (at times more pathetically--allowing myself the occasional wail of self-pity) of my tenebrous condition.

Because such poems are practically and rightfully poor stuff for at-large publication, my little blog here makes for a decent outlet.

The Playground

I have not said enough of the bed

Or the five weeks I spent there

Daily funneling through the slender

Middle of an hourglass

until the end when all of me

Had settled in the bottom.

Five weeks and I’ve only a few lines

To show for it. The comforter—ha!—

Was red, faded from use and ultraviolet

Rays. Windows are crap for stopping

Light and no great conquerors

Of playground sounds either.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

The great triumph of some days—

Crawling to the bathroom; the white

Flag of most days—pissing in a bottle.

Family bought CDs of jokes, L’Amour,

Music interposed on lapping waves.

For calmness. For calmness slows

Funneling grit. That was the theory.

At last, I lost my mind. Five weeks

Finding shapes in the ceiling:

Horses, mostly, horses on a carousel

Without poles, without children—

They were all outside in gambols.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

What else? It’s important

To be forthright. As I gathered

At the bottom, pinned by the Wrestler,

Watching my million grains cascade

Upon me. Me in the third person—

Out of body because in of it reeks

Of sweat, fear, the last several meals

And unwashed armpits. To be forthright.

It’s important. What else? Envy.

Sadness. Radish-bitter daydreams,

This one of many: Me in a tree,

Limbs like a ladder, up and up.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

Sometimes, I sang. I’ve written

Hundreds of songs but none

Of them came to mind. I sang the hymns

Of my youth. God on a horse

On the ceiling, me and the comforter—

Faded, stitched together; it cannot

Budge beneath me, I cannot rise

Above it, we are each others’ jailer.

No bars. Just keys. Jangling

From the ceiling. Do I remember

Any psalms? The twenty-third, is all.

It’s enough. For an hour. Then not even close.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

dealing with my dumbness

Once upon a time, in a physiology far, far away, there lived a fellow of my height and build (minus, say, ten, er . . . twenty pounds of flesh) with my blond hair (plus, say, fifty, er . . . seventy-five percent more volume) who was considered a man of astute perception, now and then erudite, always inquisitive, and, more often than not, brimming with strong, at-least-partially-justified opinions.

His exploits were many. Armed to the hilt with gleaming rhetoric and razoresque wit, he set about vanquishing armies of brute Ignoramuses, felling along the way fey beasts of sundry ilks--It of the Daft, It of the Dunce, It of the Downright Dippy.

All was well (discounting, of course, the alienation of friends and family) until one day, a day of doom, he was greeted by the grinning dragon--that coiled wyrm of distant legend--Oligodendroglioma. For years they fought, meeting in the wilds or along well-traveled paths. At first, they were evenly matched. He met his foe with aplomb and jocularity. But time wore on, as did his nerve, his will, and his strength.

At last, the Recondite Knight was forced to lay his weapons down. Very little has been heard of him since. Legend has spotted him napping copiously and staring, nonplussed, into the depths of space and time.

_________________________________________________


Moral: I'm dumb anymore. And one of the greatest feats of my life to date has been coming to terms with my chronically benighted state of mind. Every day and all around, issues of great importance mock my decreasing ability to comprehend them, much less expound upon or rail against them.

The seeming and/ or real, literal and/ or emotional disenfranchisement of Mexicans; Occupation of paved roads against amorphous fiends; the Ontology of Me and the Otherhood of You. It's like . . .you know . . . er . . . yeah . . . what do you call it? . . . uh, is that a rabbit over there?

But I am coming to terms. Slowly, unsurely, I'm relocating myself in the scheme of things. Where answers elude me, beauty finds me. Where gravity drops me, I rise on an invisible gust, transported to a realm of shrugged shoulders and wide, wondering eyes. Sometimes it's pleasant here. Sometimes excruciatingly lonely. The loveliness and the horror vacillate. But I belong here. Whether once I was meant to know, to understand, to argue, is irrelevant now. Now I am meant to guess, to ponder, to behold.

In short, the poet has a place and mine is in nature. The heart is a short migration from the mind. The knight trades his tower for a hermitage, grows vegetables and talks sensibly with invading bunny-rabbits.

Happily? Leave that to the utilitarians. Ever-after? Leave that to the metaphysicians.

The end? Leave that to me.

something for the season: a sonnet of sorts

Growth

We’ve gathered autumn acorns for the vase

We’ll fill with them—an ornament to place

On the tabletop.

We rest beneath the oak, our chill-stung lungs

Recuperating; down from knuckled rungs,

A brown leaf tumbles.

Corinne begins to pluck the woody caps

From their nutshells. Her cousin Lily slaps

The offending hand;

She says, Those perfect acorns . . . now they’re spoiled.

Corinne begins to cry; her humus-soiled

Fingers streak her face.

The sun grows red. The earth grows cold

Against our jeans. The year grows old.

gem-stumbling in german thought

Sporadically, I study the angst-smothered yet-somehow-delightful writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Well, "study" might be a stretch--I quit studying a long time ago--probably a phenomenon concurrent with quitting my cigarettes--the latter being a function of the former along with heavy drinking and pre-medicated anxiety. So let's just say that every now and then I pick up an unfinished book of Nietzsche's and pseudo-studiously read a few pages with the intent of one day finishing the dang thang.

Today I laid some more inroads in the seemingly interminable and largely inscrutable The Will to Power. Of the several Nietzsche offerings I have read, this particular one would come least recommended by me however so integral to N's over-all "philosophy" the musings might be. And they are integral, best as I can tell.

At any rate, as so often I have in the past, I stumbled upon a gem of concurrence between the grumpy sage and I.

For a long time now (and longer and longer now and now), I have sought subjects for my poetry that disturb the common notion of beauty. I have modified my proclivity towards the Wordsworthian Sublime to include an adoration of the stultified mundane and the staggering mutant. (A modification Wordsworth himself made as he grew older, less assured of his faith in memory and nature. But enough scholarship already . . . I have no cigarettes, no booze, and my medication alone is a poor defense.)

So as to my affinity with N. regarding the above:

"To represent terrible and questionable things is, in itself, the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence in the artist; he doesn't fear them . . . There is no such thing as a pessimistic art . . . Art affirms [. . .] The things they [such artists] show us are ugly; their reason, however, for showing them to us is their love of ugliness [. . . ] What a relief Dostoievsky is!"

Bear in mind, I claim no magnificence as an artist nor fully subscribe to N's perception of the "instinct of power." However, if not the spirit of the argument then the stuff of the argument stands. Life is mostly gross. Mostly stubbed toes and F-bombs. Mostly venom and bile. Mostly cow-cud and llama spit. For every daffodil, a million weeds. For every wandering cloud, an ominous, hail-gorged dark one.

I will end this post with one more quote from N because 1] it is apropos and 2] it makes me giggle.

"It is absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to say that 'the good and the beautiful are one'; if he should add 'and also the true,' he deserves to be thrashed. Truth is ugly. Art is with us that we may not perish through truth."

And finally with a bonus quote from my poem, "Ten More on Sandstone Tablets":

I shall stop and smell the sewage, too,

Otherwise the rose is just a rose that’s just a rose.