Where metaphors become themselves, put
the pedal to the metal, I want to be the one
not riding bitch on the plush-lined vessel’s
back seat, so that I generate (from tension!)
new metaphors also putting their pedal to the metal,
& the car I’m speaking of is Noah’s Ark, I’m the one
that got everything in there— it would have to be,
because she chose to paint kids playing King of the Hill,
because our brains did King of the Hill games back
& forth, years after all the fucking was finished,
because calculation was not foreign to the situation
on her side, so that I carry the all, the everything she is,
rich, recondite, multifariously about intelligence
or retardation, depending on her mood, green eyes
knowing the me past me that she’s counting on,
the Ark having to be a car to stunt it, in her wonted
fashion, perhaps even a jalopy. She knows me past me,
is herself a man, a king, past what was between her legs,
which I thought I found interesting past calculation,
because she set up a game there I’d fall for, & I did—
Because women who paint have two bodies,
the fragile blood/flesh vessel common, normed,
to all, & an aggregate of coalesced colors & forms,
extending residue useful to raise brains past models,
the winter day arose I plumbed the depths (for a random
reason) of my files, found a miracle, ten paintings,
all master class, by her, without understanding how
I’d mislaid them a decade before. But there, in that now,
I found her body again, the first stroked into
the second, & it was a revelation past anything but
the most violently revelatory intercourse possible
between two human beings. Honestly, not hostile
but real, our more literal expression had wobbled
on skittish rails towards the noncommittal or gossamer.
But as she left it for real, her physical body, in coalesced
colors & forms, the retrieval was all intercourse elevated
into matrimony usually thought too good for the human
race. It is, actually. Especially given the work’s twists
& turns towards revealing again all this dullness
we live in. Four bodies must suffice, to turn dullness to fullness.
You bed down in a sty,
squeeze out your mind
like a rag, catch water
(usually greasy) in tins,
mix them up (murkiness
is not undesired), add an
edge of cyanide (or gin),
yet you know all the time
none of this will do much
good, or anything at all,
most of it is destined as
bricks in no wall, thus
does the blood spill, but
when you heal, how you
grab the sun & moon places
you where chemicals beg
your brain for admittance—
The first book in my oeuvre to directly address Plymouth-Whitemarsh: autumn 2019's The Great Recession. As of late 2024, another salvo fired directly from Ply-Mar begins its journey; the Beams sequel Dance Monkey, from Funtime Press. Will I get to a trilogy? Who knows.
This lowly wise slug, stuck
to woody surfaces, rocky
bottoms, is yours: vacuum-
space, death to suck. But
lucky dips come in with such
brave vehemence (yellow
light, stop, before red) that
as we park near the woods
I hear an axe chop off your
reticence. This, however dense,
is how a man begets expanse—
what’s Eve, what’s ribbed, what’s chance—
Conventions are difficult to work around, in poetry and in books in general. Publishers tend to publish what they know will sell in the world, and both anomalous books and anomalous authors are often stung to death by an enforced status quo mentality. That having been said, when my first books were released in 2007, I was determined to book-publish, as much as I could, my way, and against the biggest publishing bete noir in English language poetry, i.m.h.o. The bete noir in question is simple— poetry collections, the convention enforces, should not cohere around any central theme or narrative, the way that fiction, drama, philosophy, and science texts do. With some notable exceptions, poets (American, UK) are encouraged to just throw the requisite number of poems together and call the result a manuscript. That, to me, is not a real book, folks. Like me or lump me (and in rock, lump me in with Floyd, thank you very much), I have a stringent definition, and a stringent standard, of what constitutes a real book, which I have now spent almost twenty years attempting to live up to. The standard means coherence and cohesiveness, built into the text, around a narrative, a set of themes, or a formal imperative, or all three at once. Some of my books are woven tightly this way, some are, as Jimmy Page would say, tight but loose. All are the nightmare of the poets I studied under to obtain my graduate degrees. Yet that, for better or for worse, is my books standard. C’est la vie.
No surprise then, that when in the late summer of 2010, a few months after the release of Apparition Poems, I finally published a grab-bag of a chapbook with Mipoesias, no story or narrative stood behind its creation and publication that much. I had it, they offered to publish it, in a collection of chapbooks they were doing at the same time. Fair. I called the thing Returns because I was returning, in a way that I could, to a sort of beginning again, before I was possessed by the literary will-to-cohesion. The individual poems I have discussed elsewhere— Wittgenstein’s Song, written at the Last Drop in spring 2005, debuted in Henniker in a Carol Frost workshop; After Andrew Marvell, about Jen Strawser’s best friend in 1996, reprised in 2008; and now, added, Twisted Limbs, double editioned in 2006, an anthem around the potentially perceived heroism of/in carnal entanglement, apostrophe, could be, to Mary or Hannah or Abby. The important sui generis thing here, the token thing, you might say, even after a few alterations have been made, is that Returns remains my contribution to the ultimate grab-bag sweepstakes. Here I am, standing with the folks at Henniker, and (more than half the time, and more than they would like to admit) at Penn and Temple, too. Being conventional, as I try not to be. Attempting, of course, to sell in the world nonetheless. Drowning, as the new cover suggests? Sort of. Who isn’t, these days?
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