This poem means to be a reversal of the typical poet-muse relationship; I once called it an “anti-muse” poem and was corrected — by a YouTube commenter! — that it’s still a tribute, in its own way.
And for some reason, I slipped in a Marshall McLuhan reference. That’s what an advanced degree does for one.
Hey, folks, two things.
First, as you might have guessed by now, Mythic Delirium 24 isn’t going to make its target release date of April. These things happen in the realm of DIY small press projects … I’m waiting on cover artist Tim Mullins to finish his newest cover and also to complete an interior illustration. Once those things are done, we launch. (Everything else is ready.)
Second, this is the final week to submit poems to be considered for publication in Issue 25. The reading window will shut down at the end of May 1. (Guidelines are here if you need a refresher.)
Giving Back to the Muse
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. She wears a necklace of knives and eyes, a sash sewn from flags and faces, boots welded from bomb fragments, a belt of hangman’s rope. You fear she’ll see you watching but you can’t look away, not even once she notices your stare. She is medium cool; she requires all your senses to impart the vision, stab your eyes, shred your feet, strangle you in half and burn your face away. Your sinuses crack like eggshells. Your loins avalanche blood. You put your tongue in her mouth, let her chew and swallow. What use were your words ever anyway?
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A small voice in the back of my brain tells me this poem was inspired by a dream, though if that’s true I have no memory of the dream itself — scattered by the winds, no doubt. What I can tell you for certain is that, surprise, surprise, there’s really nothing speculative going on here, despite the trappings. This piece is very autobiographical, a look back at the stages of my own life through the bleakest possible lens … though it’s not necessarily a truthful representation of how I view my own history. Tricksy, tricksy poetry.
On that note: Happy Easter, everyone!
Petals
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. field of memories flickers, blooms brushed by charnel winds; desperate to preserve what searing gusts leave behind, I crawl amid the vein-dark stalks that sting my hands, my face; I crawl amid the nettled stalks to find the flowers, to eat: petals from my island childhood, papaya thick, at first breadfruit sweet but bright yellow inside, tinted with red ant fire, full of wriggling legs that struggle in my throat; petals from my mountain boyhood, tobacco tang, coal bitter, thorns hidden in the creases, blue as chill air, blue as bruises under skin of dust and mud; petals from the brink of manhood, white as paper and as dry; the salt of lust, phloem of love; visions burst on the tongue, blood-red hope, blood-red despair, flavor the same; petals from my middle age, blackened before I arrive: brittle ash, peeled paint, crust that crumbles as I pluck; who could want such tasteless dregs? I blow a kiss, scatter the petals, share them with the wind that sears my face.
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All my poems stand on the words of others in some way, this particular one more explicitly than most. When my buddy Bud Webster became poetry editor at the controversial Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly he hit me up for some verse, but I was stumped at first. My longtime friend Vickie Holt started me off by suggesting what became the poem’s first line — and during a beta-read another longtime friend, Cathy Reniere, suggested the line about Slurpees and U-turns. Finally, it was Bud who came up with the poem’s title. So I owe all of them for the existence of this piece, which is a delight to perform live.
As to the topic: in our corner of the world, zoning law is an ungainly thing akin to water and sewer utilities — it’s something that affects our daily lives in all sorts of ways seen and unseen, but nothing about it fires the imagination. As a government reporter I tangled more than once with the unenviable task of attempting to present a zoning issue so it would be interesting to readers. In my quest to come up with something for Bud, I got to thinking that I’d never ever seen a skiffy poem that dealt with things like commercial and residential districts and comprehensive plans. So that’s what I wrote.
Manifest Density
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Let’s play a game of chicken with the Universe. Let’s extend our suburbs to the quasar edge. Let’s burrow condos into every moon, open discount stores at each new sun, carve two-way traffic tunnels throughout spacetime, plan cul-de-sacs of gated nebulae. Let’s evangelize all unearthly aborigines. (They too need Slurpee cups and no U-turns.) Let’s fill the empty saddle with ourselves. And if we can’t kickstart the Big Crunch with our Masses, let’s break bacchanal through all the thinning Cosmos to keep each other warm as the stars die.
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This poem is a lighthearted commemoration of the first and so far only time Anita and I attended Arisia in Boston, a sci-fi con that takes place in the dead of winter (rather inconvenient if you’re driving from Virginia.) That was in 2002, so maybe things play differently now, but when we were there I observed two local quirks of note. One, all Bostonians go out on the town wearing black from head to toe. Two, the way Bostonians handle things that are off-kilter — such as a man in a satyr costume (shirtless, with horns) lounging in a hotel lobby, or a woman (in the real life instance, my wife) having dinner in a posh restaurant in a full-blown nature spirit outfit complete with antlers and a mantle made of leaves — is to act as if they’re not there. How could I resist having fun with that?
Midnight Rendezvous, Boston
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The satyr lounges on the hotel lobby sofa, one hoof dangled over the carpet of endless fleurs-de-lis. Men and women in long black coats stumble past, in flight from the flash-freeze winds hidden in Boston’s flurries; they crawl up the stairs, weighed down by liquor and the doorman’s gaze. The satyr’s eyes track a waitress’s slit skirt as she hurries outside for a forbidden smoke. He smiles, paws the carpet, runs an idle ebony hand through his curls of beard. No one meets his gaze or looks his way. The revolving door squeaks; his horned head turns to look at the haughty antlers crowning the beast bearing down on him, with its mantle of leaves hung on shoulders strong as trees, its hide of soft fawn down stretched taught across an iron-muscled chest. The Horned One twirls his javelin, impatient, stares down his snout as the satyr reaches out, traces playful fingers down the groove of the avatar’s hard belly. No one stops or asks them to stop — in Boston, your kinks are not our business. Later, the janitor pauses, appalled at the animal noises from the restroom stall. Someday they’ll take out all the doors in here, he thinks, and goes on about his business.
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This poem has a fairly innocuous beginning. Jessica Wick, co-editor of Goblin Fruit, challenged me to write a poem about her favorite Greek god, Bacchus. Of course I accepted the challenge, and, pain in the ass that I am, since she made the mistake of telling me Bacchus was her favorite, I decided I would try to come up with the most mortifying incarnation of the old goat that I could imagine. My concept was fairly simple: update the god of wine and parties into the modern day deity of drug addiction.
Yet doing that threw a number of disturbing doors wide open. News accounts of crystal meth use in New York sex parties and addicts going into withdrawal after Hurricane Katrina are sautéed in with the fashion industry’s glamorization of “heroin chic.” And my own encounters with drug use, drug crime and its consequences while I was a courts reporter provide underpinnings for much of what happens in the poem — one story in particular that I worked on, of a teen who tried heroin for no better reason than alleviating boredom and irrevocably ruined his life, weighed heavily on me as I wrote this piece. There’s a reaction to my first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” that surfaces, and thoughts of my own father’s terminal cancer and the painkillers he takes that act as firewalls against pain also float in that mix.
Bacchus becomes conflated with Pan and the satyrs and less than any of these, a chemist consumed by his own product, summoned everywhere someone uses, everywhere someone craves, hopping like the Jersey Devil, his untrimmed and neglected hooves leaving bloody footprints wherever he goes.
