A failure, my love affair with the idea of Jesus,
indelible residue of Sunday school and choir robes,
bludgeons of sanctimony and sin,
smothered in mother love. She loved, believed: me too, Mommy!
God, I loved her, remembered verses for her, thought I loved God for her.
I follow full skirt swishing, high heels clicking us up the stairs of Army chapels,
all those ugly places of my rootless youth.
Ugly smelled good each Sunday, bouquets and polished pews
that you could slide on with long pants.
I stand tall on pull-down knee-benches installed for the Catholics:
the only Protestant Italian in the world, such a good boy.
My proto-soprano voice floats up towards God and anybody else who might notice.
‘My, ain’t he dressed nice this morning?’
I took Mark Twain as text, Mysterious Stranger,
stranger I became one day in my 16th year, stand-in boy preacher
in a Methodist cavern hiding knots of faithful whites, not dead,
not yet fled from Jersey, they stayed for Youth Sunday.
I gripped the podium, hole in my heart, took a detour at Corinthians,
tongues of men and angels, brass and cymbals
sent me into the embrace of faith’s inevitable corollary.
“There is no God,” Twain’s Satan told us: I bought it.
Mommy faith dimmed by the glimmer and gale of doubt,
extinguished when Monsieur Thibault, Gaullist and gray, in second form,
spat the translation out like poison with a precise accent Parisienne.
J.-P. Sartre grabbed Jesus Christ by the scruff of the neck and threw him out the window!
This same defenestration I soon delivered to Karl Marx
and his pantheon of word boys --- they didn’t last long,
replaced by oh, so many gods, served up in bottles, on mirrors,
on my knees in gutters without faith or hope. I needed too many windows!
Faith becomes its own reward, and doubt predicts.
Come play this silly game for savage fools, sweetbreads for brains on a plate.
Opiate, Karl said, of the masses, terrified by one single truth, common as dirt.
Oh how I long to be a boy soprano again!
September 1, 2007
8/6/07
8/2/07
WRITER'S BLOCK
Pale
Face
Border adverbs
Gestapo lesions
Passive oriental carpet bombs on special
This week only
Ass scratching
Red diaper
Baby oh baby I need you now
Now more than ever
Not my father’s
Old man and the sea
Lace
Fail
Sisters betray
Don’t tell me that, it’s too late
Baby it’s too late now
Radio instrumentalist
Fundamental paradigm
Gear
Shift
Redundant pantyhose
Oozing caterpillars
Let me call you
Sleezebag symphony
Spitting interface
Modern chain gang
Face
Border adverbs
Gestapo lesions
Passive oriental carpet bombs on special
This week only
Ass scratching
Red diaper
Baby oh baby I need you now
Now more than ever
Not my father’s
Old man and the sea
Lace
Fail
Sisters betray
Don’t tell me that, it’s too late
Baby it’s too late now
Radio instrumentalist
Fundamental paradigm
Gear
Shift
Redundant pantyhose
Oozing caterpillars
Let me call you
Sleezebag symphony
Spitting interface
Modern chain gang
WEAPON
I’m summing up the summer, summing it all up as if this were an ending, not a beginning.
Even minutes are precious now, not like the ones that have already seeped into the permanent past.
Wanna stretch ‘em out, make ‘em last, total ‘em up, list and parse ‘em —- every minute, hour, day, love, loss.
The lists are a compulsion with me, I’m a compulsive list-maker, one more compulsion on yet another list.
Compelled by an unseen hand from inside, from above, from somewhere.
A cache of weapons just beyond consciousness that I clutch in my perpetual defense:
Get that goddam devil, find him. Go inside and kill him.
I reach into the room, flick the light switch on. A sound precedes the milky wash of the of the energy efficient bulb, the suddenness of blinding white water-spotted walls.
I vibrate as I lean into the tub, water gushing onto hard porcelain, dropping plaid shorts make me stumble on the cool tiles.
The sink is surrounded by emollients and fungicides and anti-gravity hocus pocus in a jar, all now required, now for the nightly ritual, fighting gravity on the installment plan, every night a payment.
The face in the mirror bounces, brown eyes tired, tonight, an old face, like the troubles that erode the skin that people once desired.
The electric toothbrush is a weapon, procured to convince my valiant teeth to fight, to stay rooted in my head, to provide a smile.
Steam is filling up the world, and I drift into tomorrow, into a to-do list. And I think:
All of it, the self improving the self esteeming the self obsession — which of these is the fight, which surrender?
Tonight I am a hostage to the universe that will unfold in any case.
I plunge my foot in scalding water, gasping.
Even minutes are precious now, not like the ones that have already seeped into the permanent past.
Wanna stretch ‘em out, make ‘em last, total ‘em up, list and parse ‘em —- every minute, hour, day, love, loss.
The lists are a compulsion with me, I’m a compulsive list-maker, one more compulsion on yet another list.
Compelled by an unseen hand from inside, from above, from somewhere.
A cache of weapons just beyond consciousness that I clutch in my perpetual defense:
Get that goddam devil, find him. Go inside and kill him.
I reach into the room, flick the light switch on. A sound precedes the milky wash of the of the energy efficient bulb, the suddenness of blinding white water-spotted walls.
I vibrate as I lean into the tub, water gushing onto hard porcelain, dropping plaid shorts make me stumble on the cool tiles.
The sink is surrounded by emollients and fungicides and anti-gravity hocus pocus in a jar, all now required, now for the nightly ritual, fighting gravity on the installment plan, every night a payment.
The face in the mirror bounces, brown eyes tired, tonight, an old face, like the troubles that erode the skin that people once desired.
The electric toothbrush is a weapon, procured to convince my valiant teeth to fight, to stay rooted in my head, to provide a smile.
Steam is filling up the world, and I drift into tomorrow, into a to-do list. And I think:
All of it, the self improving the self esteeming the self obsession — which of these is the fight, which surrender?
Tonight I am a hostage to the universe that will unfold in any case.
I plunge my foot in scalding water, gasping.
COMING NIGHT
I am sending a call to the men of a certain age.
Men like me whose decades give them keys to locks, lock on the door that opens onto the unknown world.
I am sending a call to the men, not the women who nurture and feed the children,
To the men who are keepers of the myths, tellers of the stories around campfires where we gather after the hunt, rivaling the wolves: a day, a life, an epoch of keeping the wolves in their place.
I am sending out a call to the men, not men who are strong, not men who are weak, but all men.
Those who will summon within themselves, as I do, the courage to scale the steepness to the cliff, and to jump.
I am sending a call to the men whose disgust with the ordered arrangement of the hours and moments and seconds is fevered like a young man’s, who want to fall down and scream out to the universe: “I am here.”
I am sending a call to the men who are despised, the spit upon and jeered at, the marginal, the hated, whose pain creates a parallel universe of beauty without which the haters would perish.
I am sending a call to the men who love each other, some who mimic the others and some who rebel, those whose love is tidy and printed in the Sunday New York Times and those who continue to trawl the gutters of Chelsea and SoMa and Halsted, those whose stench has sweetened my nostrils and brought me sharply to my senses more than once.
I am sending a call to the men who are lonely, in a room with only the dancing pixels to animate their neurons and excite their dormant imaginations, deadened by the effort to get up in the morning, living for their next dose of Paxil.
I am sending a call to the men, the ones I’ve never met, the legions I yearn to meet,
standing shoulder to shoulder at the top of the earth, standing on the frozen tundra with upstretched arms, standing tall with pride and power, standing in the sunlight of the supreme, standing without shame.
Ready to follow and ready to lead, ready to dig deep down into the endless reservoirs of wisdom that have flowed into their lives, ready to offer a drink to the stranger who still wanders with empty eyes, ready to stand with the others in the sunset, ready to face the night.
Men like me whose decades give them keys to locks, lock on the door that opens onto the unknown world.
I am sending a call to the men, not the women who nurture and feed the children,
To the men who are keepers of the myths, tellers of the stories around campfires where we gather after the hunt, rivaling the wolves: a day, a life, an epoch of keeping the wolves in their place.
I am sending out a call to the men, not men who are strong, not men who are weak, but all men.
Those who will summon within themselves, as I do, the courage to scale the steepness to the cliff, and to jump.
I am sending a call to the men whose disgust with the ordered arrangement of the hours and moments and seconds is fevered like a young man’s, who want to fall down and scream out to the universe: “I am here.”
I am sending a call to the men who are despised, the spit upon and jeered at, the marginal, the hated, whose pain creates a parallel universe of beauty without which the haters would perish.
I am sending a call to the men who love each other, some who mimic the others and some who rebel, those whose love is tidy and printed in the Sunday New York Times and those who continue to trawl the gutters of Chelsea and SoMa and Halsted, those whose stench has sweetened my nostrils and brought me sharply to my senses more than once.
I am sending a call to the men who are lonely, in a room with only the dancing pixels to animate their neurons and excite their dormant imaginations, deadened by the effort to get up in the morning, living for their next dose of Paxil.
I am sending a call to the men, the ones I’ve never met, the legions I yearn to meet,
standing shoulder to shoulder at the top of the earth, standing on the frozen tundra with upstretched arms, standing tall with pride and power, standing in the sunlight of the supreme, standing without shame.
Ready to follow and ready to lead, ready to dig deep down into the endless reservoirs of wisdom that have flowed into their lives, ready to offer a drink to the stranger who still wanders with empty eyes, ready to stand with the others in the sunset, ready to face the night.
HOPE
They tell me that, no matter what, I am loved. They tell me I am loved.
They tell me that I create my own reality; that all meaning is assigned, that I need a giant decoder ring to grasp the universe unfolding, an unfolding that I do not make, a universe that started before I came upon this sacred earth and will not stop when I am buried in it.
They ardently believe, not that I can be anything I want to be, but that I can be more of who I already am. The trick is to know thyself, they tell me.
They tell me I am loved.
They tell me to spot the signposts, the tap on the shoulder, the yearnings, the dreams, the synchronicities that make me say oh, my!
They tell me that I have but to look up to see the stars, not down, to look up & see the light, not dark, to look up to see the Master, oh master, I am but a boy who needs a guide, where are you when I need you?
They tell me to find my gifts, to seek my passion, to revere my values, hew to my purpose, sharpen my vision, define my beliefs: is that all?
They tell me I am loved.
And what if they are right, the oracles of this not-so New Age, what if they are right?
What if the love I need is wrapped around me like a blanket, and the pain that I feel only comes when it slips off my shoulder to the ground?
What if they are right? That loves wash over me all of my days, bursts from the heart, floods upon the wounds the world inflicted, what if they are right?
Right about the love that has always been there, waiting like a spring, deep in the ground, a well without a bottom, a darkness from the depth that scares me right before the flow begins?
What if they are right? Right about the scales that drop from our eyes, right about the golden splendor, what if they have always been right, the Spirit Ones, the ones I sneer at, not the churchy fools and heartless conditional love machines of the mega churches and homegrown jihads, not the silly robots of marching magazine subscribers, not the speeding fools on the superhighways without signs, not the ridiculous finger waggers with too many pets to clean up after and children that hate them.
No, I mean the real Spirit Ones, the ones I see as woo-woo’s, the Ones who buy the books in the incense burning storefronts and meditation centers atop the wooded mountains, the Ones who chant in tongues of their enemies and learn the lingo that stabs their parents in the heart, the Ones who trade their ties in for tie-dies and die tied to shapes other than the cross, cross with each other til they shut up and listen, the Ones who know peace.
What if they are right when they smile through the pain, when whisper like a lover on the next pillow and they touch me with their tears?
What if they are right when we take our clothes off in the street and run towards the sunset with a flock of doves and hawks in attendance in the open blue sky, as the end of the world draws near, and all we can do is laugh at the ridiculous joke we just got, a joke that took forever to understand, a joke which we cannot tell another, because there is no punchline, there is no line that I can use to pull myself in, reeling from the feeling that there is nothing but hope left in a nation of the hopeless, so get over it.
Get hope, get hopped up with the hope, hoping that someday, I’ll know what they are talking about, and know, not think, not hope, but really know that they are right when they tell me I am loved.
They tell me that I create my own reality; that all meaning is assigned, that I need a giant decoder ring to grasp the universe unfolding, an unfolding that I do not make, a universe that started before I came upon this sacred earth and will not stop when I am buried in it.
They ardently believe, not that I can be anything I want to be, but that I can be more of who I already am. The trick is to know thyself, they tell me.
They tell me I am loved.
They tell me to spot the signposts, the tap on the shoulder, the yearnings, the dreams, the synchronicities that make me say oh, my!
They tell me that I have but to look up to see the stars, not down, to look up & see the light, not dark, to look up to see the Master, oh master, I am but a boy who needs a guide, where are you when I need you?
They tell me to find my gifts, to seek my passion, to revere my values, hew to my purpose, sharpen my vision, define my beliefs: is that all?
They tell me I am loved.
And what if they are right, the oracles of this not-so New Age, what if they are right?
What if the love I need is wrapped around me like a blanket, and the pain that I feel only comes when it slips off my shoulder to the ground?
What if they are right? That loves wash over me all of my days, bursts from the heart, floods upon the wounds the world inflicted, what if they are right?
Right about the love that has always been there, waiting like a spring, deep in the ground, a well without a bottom, a darkness from the depth that scares me right before the flow begins?
What if they are right? Right about the scales that drop from our eyes, right about the golden splendor, what if they have always been right, the Spirit Ones, the ones I sneer at, not the churchy fools and heartless conditional love machines of the mega churches and homegrown jihads, not the silly robots of marching magazine subscribers, not the speeding fools on the superhighways without signs, not the ridiculous finger waggers with too many pets to clean up after and children that hate them.
No, I mean the real Spirit Ones, the ones I see as woo-woo’s, the Ones who buy the books in the incense burning storefronts and meditation centers atop the wooded mountains, the Ones who chant in tongues of their enemies and learn the lingo that stabs their parents in the heart, the Ones who trade their ties in for tie-dies and die tied to shapes other than the cross, cross with each other til they shut up and listen, the Ones who know peace.
What if they are right when they smile through the pain, when whisper like a lover on the next pillow and they touch me with their tears?
What if they are right when we take our clothes off in the street and run towards the sunset with a flock of doves and hawks in attendance in the open blue sky, as the end of the world draws near, and all we can do is laugh at the ridiculous joke we just got, a joke that took forever to understand, a joke which we cannot tell another, because there is no punchline, there is no line that I can use to pull myself in, reeling from the feeling that there is nothing but hope left in a nation of the hopeless, so get over it.
Get hope, get hopped up with the hope, hoping that someday, I’ll know what they are talking about, and know, not think, not hope, but really know that they are right when they tell me I am loved.
SEX EDUCATION
Special effects laden walking
down the path, decomposed likely
suspects accumulate warm
breath ejaculating over
the hillside purple against
the wind mountains of
books at my bedside
pillows block the alpha
waves lasagne casserole may be in the
oven extremely busy patterned rug
haunts wild boars root around for
acorns parading their British
heritage lost the memory
card the images seep into
backpack modern cartoon love is
possible now elder hostel life with
brightly colored wounds you
will know how when He tells you
down the path, decomposed likely
suspects accumulate warm
breath ejaculating over
the hillside purple against
the wind mountains of
books at my bedside
pillows block the alpha
waves lasagne casserole may be in the
oven extremely busy patterned rug
haunts wild boars root around for
acorns parading their British
heritage lost the memory
card the images seep into
backpack modern cartoon love is
possible now elder hostel life with
brightly colored wounds you
will know how when He tells you
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