La Vita Nuova

The weather's ever grey these days, like the glass

that flattened my midnight pool alit with blues

some forty years ago to a silent ectomorph

that carried no pleasant interpretative choice.

I'm down, I'm really down, I'm ground-down down,

the birds have gone away and just the pets

remain to regularly empty cans

from supermarkets in a daily scheduled way;

again about the water it's looking dead

without a hint of the micro-organisms

that doubtless are sleeping, awaiting better times.

Awaiting better times ... as if the past

awaited us, quote, "Tomorrow will be better;

in 2018, things will be much better."

 

"If you think there's something to be done, if you think you can do things a whole lot better, then go off and do it. Be a god. Build a world for yourself. Populate it with the things of the sea and air. What are you waiting for? Smarty-pants. How many times has this story been told? There's nothing new under the sun. If you care to pursue this, give it another run-through. Liven it up, with better chords. Put it in E♯, or try the mixolydian mode. You have to come up with something better next time."

 

An action film with bullets blasting through

the silver screen is somewhere playing loud,

so violently loud the sounds rush flight on heels

the movements made by our protagonists

who flee slo mo the fireballs blasting over

their panicked hearts that cannot still be beat.

How many imitations down does it exist

where one can say: it's real and not a lie?

Is Troy the girl (or boy) they chase with guns

ablaze, so deepened in psychology

they do and do so simply it's called do?

But here I sit, a thousand miles away,

Reflecting thus, and wondering what to say.

 

"That all happened so long ago, it's almost pointless to try to tie yourself to Troy. There are more important matters in the world, with a longer and unbroken chain. What about the ties of kinship? Is there anything that can be called deeper than that? And yet where are your ruminations on your heritage? You're using this Troy nonsense as a dodge. I can smell it. What, are you, by describing picture-watchers, comparing yourself to the immortal Homer? Have some sense if not modesty. In any case, where are the epic similes? You should try like or as."

 

Thin paper framed with balsa wood: a lens

in front that focussed from afar the sun:

a clock to say of when eclipse would come:

we couldn't stop the thing from happening.

The light began to fade, as Hercules

entwined in serpent blood Olympus rose

with seven sympathetic warble doves,

and I cross-legged sat to see the spot

as into focus it became, a perfect dot

of meaning that excluded every square

by saying: Zoroaster was correct

to worship me and me alone, for what's

more perfect than my perfect disc?

The light returned, along with all its flaws,

and we returned, to our conceited laws.

 

"What is one supposed to make of this? Have you suddenly broke Zoroastrian? Nothing else is perfect enough, nothing but the sun? I remember eclipses as being so unutterably boring that the hype machine had to go into overdrive. Sure, the earth goes around the sun, and the moon goes around the earth, so the moon has to get in the way of the sun sometimes. It can't not happen. I shouldn't get so wrapped up about it. I also think it clear your Homeric simile is half-baked. Maybe I should ease off now."

 

So, snowstorm born, I'm longing for my death:

I daren't waste my cash on long-term plans

I hope to not fulfill; a Metropass

could one day be some days a useless thing

if I expire, say, on the thirteenth day!

That's how I live, each morn expecting not

to see the setting of that perfect sun;

each lunch I make in wonder if I'll have

the time to finish it; each day some ache

I didn't have the day before to never end

until I end from bone to gut to skin!

A tempo of a tale's a sorry thing

when no-one hears the song one has to sing.

 

"Have you seen a doctor? Have you seen a podiatrist? Have you seen a psychologist? Have you seen an oracle? Have you seen a chiropractor? Have you seen a tarot reader? Have you seen a shrink? Have you seen a priest? Have you seen a somnambulist? Have you seen a cop? Have you seen an undertaker? Have you seen a politician? Have you seen a physician? Have you seen a classicist? Have you seen a friend? Have you seen a reporter? Have you seen a journeyman? Have you seen a midwife?"

 

The gentleman, stopping one of three,

said: "Where's the Eiffel Tower? By my map,

it can't be more than sixty yards from here."

The one looked left to air and right to air

and up and down so seriously the gent

believed his eyes deceived his ancient brain;

"Your map. The date upon your map. What's that?"

The gent pulled forth the map but yet he looked

for copyright the one said, "Never mind

the date, for what the map is worth is less

the price of this: the territory's not the map.

The Eiffel Tower's sitting in your lap."

 

"If it weren't for plagiarism, what kind of giarism could there be? I know your game; I know where you steal from. The well from which you take your water will not last forever; brain disease is commoner than, well, thought. You think you'll wake up after going to sleep forever? You think the unconscious mind has an eternity to it? You think Coleridge appreciates how you've mangled his work? Wait.... I've just now consulted with him, and he laughed in my face. I am with him, and you are not. He said: 'There is nothing new under the sun!'"

 

The heart's a haunting co-conspirator,

in league with long-lost love and empty glasses,

as whiskers slowly grow on dead men's faces

to greet their graves with fetching how-d'ye-dos,

thus does this muscle, always with this urge,

persuade the brain to reach with legs and arms

at anything that's more alive than this

its cedar box alive though recent hewn.

The needful reach cannot be not be made,

as vampiristic lust is bred-in-bone,

as lifelessness, disgusted with itself,

reaches, grabs for, bone-filled fingers curled,

for everything it lacks.

                                                Thus worms my heart,

the organ always saying let us start.

 

"I see what you're trying to do. You're trying to make me approve, with your assonance and similes. You could persuade me: but not by this. Shakespeare got to me twice, once in Romeo and Juliet, and once in Cardenio; but that was before the enlightenment. Since then, there's been nothing that really spoke to me. Sure, I liked The Big Sleep; but only as an amusement. It must be known to you that, despite recent critical work saying there was only an idea of an enlightenment, a poetic notion only noticed some seventy years later, Dracula is still thirsty for bloob."

 

There was the time the actress and her friend,

another actress, at a party, took off

their things and walked around entirely bare;

when asked, they said that "someone took our clothes!"

There were some sights to see: the breasts, the hair,

two dewy slits they opened on request,

inviting all to like their coral quims:

now that's what I call self-display!

That kind of show gets criticized by some

who doubtless do not like performance art

nor things surprising nor obscenely done;

for me (who wasn't there), that feminine

display defines the scandal of the good:

I can't explain the feeling if I could.

 

"Well, how extraordinary is that. I can think of nothing more fascinating. Are you sitting uncomfortably? Have you any other sexual fantasies to share? We're all quite interested down here. Do you dream about Japanese Nudity Day? If not, why not? We all know what the feeling was, and where it happened. Why be coy? In any case, we much appreciate how revealing you are about yourself. We didn't believe the rumours until now. We know it happened a great many years ago. Are you still playing it over in your head? You are understood."

 

Vermont. A sunny Autumn day. My mom,

my wife, my self, are driving past a lake

along a narrow hem that separates

a mountain cliff from waters down below.

We stop to stretch our legs. I see a man

who's walking up some ancient stairs to top

the cliff; the steps are steeply set and four

by fours; the man gets to the top and stops.

I look away, distracted by a comment:

'Check that view!' I note the view and say

some thing concerning how it's cold in there,

then turn again to see the steps so steep:

but they're no longer there; no four by fours.

 

"There you go, thieving again. What do you know about Vermont? You picked it because 1) you know there's lakes and cliffs there, and 2) it's a sturdy iamb.

"Even in a dream, you can't go home again. Each image is divorced from every other image, and the only continuity is invented. This could have been anything disappearing: a house, a mouse, a louse, a souse: and the affect would have been the same. It's a cliff, though; that must have meant to you some pasty symbolism. There's something wrong with you."

 

Ah me! My mind and mine are slipping passed!

My inner guts and joints are rotting fast!

My greatest days: forever in the past!

The many songs that may be rung from this

would chock an elephant if mashed to paste,

the rhyme that flows from commonplaces strung

into the semblance of good feet replacing

the bad (with corn and bunion callous plast)

would smock a bishop out of his albumen!

But, as the senses fall apart, the idée is

so cracked and fixed that no-one can complaint!

Ah me! My mind and mine are slipping passed!

My greatest days: forever in the past!

 

"Very funny. It looks like you're pulling a fast one, but no-one is fooled, and you're trying to turn that non-fooling in upon yourself like you were expecting it all along. 'The history of the self-consuming artefact is a long and often interesting one.' You can't turn failure into success. You should know that by now. You should know that by now. Waaaaay back when, I remember, you could write passable love lyrics in doggerel. You'd have to get some spark of a heart back, along with you mind and self. Otherwise, continue spinning your wheels."

 

the fire slowly turns upon its tray

a carousel whose edge is hid below

the platform's edge and turning slow it seems

it's not in motion and at rest although

it turns electromagnets make it turn

while Mr. Magical performs routines

involving rings he holds behind the flames

that disappear, appear, and re-appear

at different rates depending how they're held

and turned with the flames distracting all of us

who watch from only seven feet away and ooh

and aah so stupidly so stupidly

I say because we know the trick it's old

the oldest in the world it's in our bones

it made our bones that fire upon that tray

 

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. Cf. Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Wilde, Dickinson, Tagore, Frost, Hughes, Whitman, Blake, Kipling, Neruda, Plath, Tennyson, Bukowski, Rossetti, Nash, Emerson, Poe, Donne, Keats, Carroll, Sandburg, Shelley, Hardy, Pushkin, Hugo, et cetera."

 

The gazes of these faces like God erased

all tells within the subways tell or don't

of the rhyming fictions, destinations, the aims,

that mark the cards they're playing with today,

but not so far as to bet, as surest things,

a part of your heart on their humanity;

and yet you look, as you are looked upon,

and move your leg to let a passage through,

and sigh a face you may have seen before;

or never seen before, the agony

of parting from your red rose in the morning

like all here who look on you as a hand

in a long game, stretched into the future.

 

"He's very sick now. Years ago he was on the train, a foreigner to those parts. He was looking around at all the people, and he focused his attention on a brown Indian hand that was grasping a pole. He counted the wrinkles and considered the slenderness of the fingers. The train rocked in the afternoon then slowed to arrive at some station I don't recall which. The hand left the pole as the woman got out. He said: 'I'll never see that hand again.' This statement he had to make."

 

A funeral for something's been announced,

by wireless, television, internet,

with special visitation times for those

who simply cannot make it on the day.

Donations can be made to anyone

whom anybody thinks has been affected

by this the death of something, evermore,

and tax receipts will in return be given.

If anybody wants a requiem

a list of good composers can be found

on verso of this sheet, alongside names

of versifiers sensitively apt.

The wailing can begin at noon, and if

there's anyone you think will not receive

this message, pass it on; don't let your neighbours

sadly miss something's funeral.

 

"I can elaborate. There's a chapel and there's a casket. The casket is open and it's evenly filled with dirt. Curtains are to left and right. A podium of some sort is beside the casket. There's a framed photograph of something on the floor near the casket. Organ music is playing in the otherwise silence. You're dressed well, there in the front row. Something meant a lot to you, and now it's gone. Something will never be replaced. You're speechless in your grief. The back of the chapel is cinderblock. You count the cinderblocks. You count 180."

 

Well on Main Street USA's a real nice spot

where the fairy tales go to give it a shot

all showing their twists to the big hotshots

sayn make me your star, don't ask me why not

 

And look I beat that the girl asleep

apples don't she cried

the cash is low and the cows do low

let's go get Disneyfied

 

Well here comes a German princess ignored

'cause her older sisters flat as boards

got suitors putting on slippers and such

the poor girl she got to do so much

 

The monster here has seven heads yeah

cave I'm in she cried

my agent wants his ten per cent

so let me get Disneyfied

 

I got to make money I got to get fame

so Walt turn your foolish head the same

as you did back then with Pin-oc-chi-o

make me a fake like the oleo

 

And hollered sluuut me up Walter

slut me up to pay she cried

could go next-door take it up the back-door

if I don't get Disneyfied

 

"I can see you're not taking this assignment seriously. Don't think you can get away with this. This is going down on your permanent record. Reconsider!"