Maybe the Zodiac killer of the ‘60s disappeared from earth or at least California and true to his name began stalking the night sky instead Killing off constellations he thought were rubbishy glitter, or taking a razor to the Gemini Twins for their sophistry and pretense Finally, someone stabbing new stories into the darkness, a stiletto cutting fresh scars with needles of light: The Goblin, The Madhouse Nebula, The Killer Toys Holding my hand, you point: "Look, there! next to the Pleiades Morgue – isn't that Ted Bundy?" I say, no, it is Ted Hughes, husband of Sylvia Plath, serial killer of poetesses, his words slashing lines in poems "Oh yes, I see that now, and there's The Oven! Yes, yes there she is, can you see Sylvia, her head, that cluster of stars filling the kitchen like vapor, gas?" Which makes the starlight fray and dim, the night now a bit dark even for me
Category: Shay’s Word Garden
Close Work With Print
A blackbird rose from the catastrophe of scrub, pomp and plump of snow clattering off branches. Its wings were flapping like a book flying off the shelf, feathers black and smudged from close work with print, wingtips of words and birdsong slipped with ice melt and berries. I say "Downward to darkness, on extended wings." and the bird grimaces, because I always say that, because it is always "Sunday Morning" for me, in my waking dream I wander through a poem of coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, words, the fragrance of lilacs. The bird whistles: "Call me Wallace." This old, odd chimera of my life made of papier mâché, an ill-matched pastiche – part lumbering walk, part postcards from Colorado, part the haunted mask I wear – laughable my pretense of the ancient sacrifice, to arrive at this place in the woods without gloom or suffering – a bird rising from the snow, its beak red with berries, testing my reality as if I were the poem, the fabrication, the dithered smudge flying across a white field.
DSM-5
I don't want anesthesia for breakfast again,
no pouring naptha on my cheerios, or ether
in an oatmeal feed bag over my nose and mouth.
(However nasotracheal intubation of coffee
is indicated per DSM-5, 315.30 (F80.89) –
Pragmatic Communication Disorder, e.g. Poetry1)
Better your feral kissing stays stitched
across my skull, sutures of the cranial plates
fused into a flight of starlings, like radios
tuned to the shillelagh station – Swing, somewhere
between Cab Calloway and a blackthorn club
arcing towards my head.
Awareness.
Concussion.
Only you.
1Diagnostic Features:
“Social (pragmatic) communication disorder is characterized by a primary difficulty with pragmatics, or the social use of language and communication, as manifested by deficits in understanding and following social rules of verbal and nonverbal communication in naturalistic contexts, changing language according to the needs of the listener or situation, and following rules for conversations and storytelling. The deficits in social communication result in functional limitations in effective communication, social participation, development of social relationships, academic achievement, or occupational performance. The deficits are not better explained by low abilities in the domains of structural language or cognitive ability.” (From DSM-5, pg. 48)
The Q100 to Rikers
At the end of the line – Ditmars Boulevard in Queens – shake yourself awake, yawn, get off the N train. In the shitty weather walk three blocks north on 31st to the bus stop, about 50 feet from the corner. There you can wait in line with the nuns, wives, mothers and girlfriends for the Q100 to Rikers. You've never been to this jail – an island in the ocean sound built on bones and sorrow, landfill of ashes, ghosts, hauled by the inmates to make their own burial ground. If you are looking for prison poets – who shot their lovers like Verlaine shot Rimbaud – they are slumped in plastic chairs in front of the tv. They know a thief when they see one. You are here with your poetry workshop to steal what is furious, fierce, Eat and feast on what is glorious: "The heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.*" *Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"
For Laura Nyro
When three dogs howl in the night, what's a catgirl to do? Skinned of song, you yowl the blue in your veins like a train whistle exhaling, wailing, disappearing like oxygen that ends in fury, a holy song that confesses what every Tom in the alley knows: hide your heart fearless girl – it's only a short toss into the remaindered hay, for when the winter snows part there are no coffins for strays.
The Web of Life
Did you just brag you measure your life in sheets of toilet paper? Stuck to the bottom of your foot, uncoiling the roll as you leave the bathroom you are a Charmin spider, exuding and unspooling your load as you walk through the living room and out the door, taking the bus to work where you circle the conference table until your boss is wrapped like a Halloween mummy so they send you to Paris and you are on the airplane jet trails of TP streaming and screaming out behind you, you’re a paper Frequent Flyer, Million Miler club of all the crap you’ve had to deal with, don’t cry or the world cries with you and we have to wipe the whole soggy gobbledegoo from our eyes our front yards the earth a trail of tears and a white Christmas after all? Be careful – no smoking – or you will light a fuse and find the world is a bowl of cherry bombs, an explosion of blackberry cobbler without sanitary napkins, a spark that follows you back igniting your history if not your imagination, unwinding and spiraling the idiots and maniacs into torched frenzy until at the very end of the line you find your head in a gas oven like Sylvia daddy daddy daddy with poems burning their way across the kitchen floor.
Bobby Bly and F. Scott Fitzgerald Walk Into a Bar…
Bly's is the cue ball, his mind breaking Fitzgerald's rack, club ties striped and solid but eight-ball in the corner pocket, the dark-haired fever of it – F Scott buried in a pauper's grave Though Bly is only twelve in 1940 the next morning they're chewing cigarettes and champagne, tobacco bubbles and sparkles in their teeth – light of the sun trespassing through the empty glasses Fitzgerald is a flabby edition, his suit dog-eared, unsteady from the hotel, bookstore to bookstore, asking for a copy of his books, but no, his work a has-been, a feather mourning the precarity of wind and tremendous fame. Bly says we're dead now, whither shall we go? We lived in the front pocket of delirium, sorrow and lint to mix for our ink. Vienna will not have you nor write on your tomb: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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