Other Cruel Things
Ray Succre
Other Cruel Things By Ray Succre
Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA
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Other Cruel Things By Ray Succre Copyright © 2009 All Rights Reserved. Published by Differentia Press Book Design by Felino A. Soriano Cover Art, courtesy of Ray Succre Except for the sole purpose for use in reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, without the written permission from the publisher. Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA 93458 submissions@differentiapress.com
Differentia Press Poetic Collections of the │Experimental Spectrum│ differentiapress.com
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The author would like to acknowledge everyone.
The author would also like to express his gratitude to the following publications, where some of the poems in this collection first appeared or are forthcoming in print:
Fence-Side first appeared in Anemone Sidecar, Chapter 4, 2009 Dead On (Indirectly) first appeared in Chippens, March 2009 If It Should Happen first appeared in Full of Crow, March 2009 Paradiso is forthcoming from American Mythville Review Little Trembler All the Time first appeared in Verb-Ate-Him, Issue #1, April 2009 Say Something Hot first appeared in The Legendary, April 2009 When They Stop Where He Imagined is forthcoming from Oak Bend Review Rabbit and Warren first appeared in 322 Review in May 2009 Epigon is forthcoming from Cake An Unrelenting Hush first appeared in The Sound of Poetry Review, March 2009 Stay Close, the Morning Hurries was first printed by Unmoveable Feast, March 2009 Nowaday Spry first appeared in Counterexample Poetics, August 2009 Slop was seen first in The Maynard, February 2009 In the Manner of a Low Sky-Creep first appeared in Fact-Simile, Fall 2009 A Body of Work was first printed in Word Salad, Spring 2009 Out appeared previously in The Houston Literary Review, May 2009 Eftsoons first appeared in Paper Crow, Fall 2009 The Six-Month Job is forthcoming in The Oddville Press Why So Abstract first appeared in Gloom Cupboard, September 2008 Heavier than Air was first seen in Poetry Cemetery, January 2009
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Table of Contents Shut Up and Talk………………………………………………………………………………13 Epigon…………………………………………………………………………………………..14 Fence-Side………………………………………………………………………………………15 In the Market Bazaar…………………………………………………………………………….16 How to Write This Poem………………………………………………………………………...17 Flower Poetry…………………………………………………………………………………….18 Dead On (Indirectly)……………………………………………………………………………..19 If It Should Happen………………………………………………………………………………20 Paradiso………………………………………………………………………………………….21 Little Trembler All the Time……………………………………………………………………..22 Better Home and Garden………………………………………………………………………….23 A Masque Presented at the Bus Stop…………………..…………………………………………24 In the Performance of Your Indispensable Books………………………………………………..25 In Labors of Conceit……………………………………………………………………………...26 Say Something Hot……………………………………………………………………………….27 No, We are with the Others………………………………………………………………………28 In Sneers of Cold, Intermission…………………………………………………………………..29 A Prettier Intermission……………………………………………………………………………30 A Grand, Young Life…………………………………………………………………………….31 When They Stop Where He Imagined……………………………………………………………32 Accendo Matrimonium…………………………………………………………………………..33 Rabbit and Warren………………………………………………………………………………34 An Unrelenting Hush…………………………………………………………………………….35 Stay Close, the Morning Hurries………………………………………………………………...36 I Have Been Much Indebted To It………………………………………………………………37 Sweets and Sicks………………………………………………………………………………..38 For Peppery Guards of Well-Perched Eyes……………………………………………………..39 Autopsy………………………………………………………………………………………….40 Nowaday Spry…………………………………………………………………………………..41 Evolution………………………………………………………………………………………..42 Breakthrough……………………………………………………………………………………43 On the Large Humor……………………………………………………………………………44 Slop……………………………………………………………………………………………..45 The List of the Wharf……………………………………………………………………………46 In the First Person……………………………………………………………………………….47 Subtle Bends and Snapping Bands………………………………………………………………48 The Manner of a Low Sky-Creep………………………………………………………………..49 A Body of Work…………………………………………………………………………………50 A Prince the Day…………………………………………………………………………………51 5th Street Uttermost………………………………………………………………………………52 Out……………………………………………………………………………………………….53 Eftsoons………………………………………………………………………………………….54 Big Booth Cuddle………………………………………………………………………………..55 A Night About Periwinkle………………………………………………………………………56 5|Other Cruel Things
Table of Contents Continued… The Six-Month Job………………………………………………………………………………57 Why So Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………58 Kiss My Conceit………………………………………………………………………………….59 Heavier Than Air…………………………………………………………………………………60
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This book is dedicated to my son, Painter, the little man who always lets me play sidekick.
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The trouble with books of poetry is the same difficulty one encounters in a confection shop; by whatever means enter, see the distinct forms crept into each case, the richness and sober crafting— but dear god, it's a collection, not a twat; you don't eat all of it at once or you're likely to vomit.
Works are salvage, or, those things got through a premise of salvation, at last a pension and malfeasance, the jitters and medicine, but first these unquenchable hobbies and other cruel things.
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10 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Other Cruel Things
11 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
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Shut Up and Talk
No more marine exposition, no more floral fetters, no, and by a joy with breath, no more expiry. I tire of you. Childhood is doomed always. I throw out the old photographs, garbage all, and love might go without reference now, tough and stringy and blandly boiled as it is (why we often serve it with wine). What more? Reference the Almighty or past? Gad, a handgun with balls hanging from the grip. Summery urge? Fits of rebuttal or pretty summary? Hello sleepy. Irreverent this-and-that, surreal that-to-this, the absurd or look-see hint? What more? Too many winks burn out one eye. No more, but what more? Less? I am choking. Sadly, they are the looping stems tomorrow that will bark us what we made. I've no answer. Let's talk.
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Epigon
I became electric when I began bathing with jellyfish, preponderant in seeking to retire in isolation, whereby my small nurse, Solitude, might imitate me. I filled the bathtub with cold water and lovely hydrozoans. They plumed their tendrils and fettered their wings, and I slid into them, the water, being a creaturely thing, joining the siphonophore, a variate bustle of clarity. I would report there was warmth, companionship, but I became poisonous, which is a brazen and honest trait. Natation overjoys my will. I might swim indecently, dangle my trim threads where stings connote hunger. Deep in the murmurous cantons of men, I would steal with a mimic the horse from his knees, the marsupial his pocket, the man-of-war his skill, and do each of their grey hairs much violence.
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Fence-Side
They held up their agate drinks and took chills in hurdle sips— each bathed the next, making gulps in afternoon, and they soon dipped, stepping their scrawny legs down into the pool. Near these backyarder folk in dripping shorts, carpetweed. Near these July swimmers, other life pressed against the fence, life that in pollinate levers was stropping with oxtongue, life that ate hard and then parched in the day's Sun rind. The hours pass and Sun drums back, marauding behind the hills, so their mood is also behind the hills, and they dry themselves and are dry again from drink, entering a house that certain life has made tall, and away from the certain life that builds their agitation with swatted flies near the sovereign, slim-curbed pool.
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In the Market Bazaar
Encounter grammarians, some feral and damn-it-all, making capsicum statements. See antiquated faces in part ancestral, quotes within quotes. To your left, let me tell you, lacy pups who can't but hold up the walls of their homes. To the right, bulwarker sorts who, when finally nude, treat areolas like cactus. Before us, one younger woman with pelican genes. Before us, one younger man with a Roman column posture. In the market bazaar, wares and people all looks and making value— who could not but admire this art?
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How to Write This Poem
The just-shy of four gave an aggregate blue— you know this; summery days are full of that color, as are certain corals and puffing moods. What I should be doing is introducing the point: My son is an ant-killer, half in confusion, and half less than kind. The themes of this poem are cruelty and weight, in Summer three-quarters past three. Let me start here: Nothing happened. Little emmet nest spoiled, little lives spilling. My son at their outskirts devastates the line-gang, each ant, in turn lost beneath a foot. The climax of this poem is when I describe his killer eyes as well-cut jewels of June. After this, to end the poem anew, I add that we soon pass into the stomach of our home to ease away and unseat the hotness from our blood.
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Flower Poetry
When the flowers first escaped the row, having scattered their generatives in time with a good wind, I used poison to contain them. Certain gardeners know you can only own beautiful things if you keep them in a square. These were hearty poison-eating flowers, I discovered. Soon, they made the grounds, even rooting in the concrete walk. Hurrah for wildness, hurray for its life, I thought, leaving them be. I remember too clearly the morning I witnessed the first flower to get inside the house. It was growing from the kitchen floor. I contained this pretty creature by setting a large soup-pot over it. By next afternoon, the flower had called a compatriot, and the pot had been overturned. There was little time before their assault occurred. Past the ramparts of my porch and windows, the flowers crept in, each making a delicious scent, sweetness in the walls, emanating from the fixtures, flowers curling into the breadbox, out of the soot-flecked oven— Last night, I heard them trying the bedroom door. I sit now on his leather, well-papered workbench, as the doctor tugs the first stalk-backed root from my head.
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Dead On (Indirectly)
Contents_Hot thinks well of himself, per se, and thinks you're the virtue circular he met through an online dating mess. You should know, Miss_Gourmet, Contents_Hot spends Thursdays dunking his costumes in Tide for the churner-paddle, eating microwaved sandwich pockets (the package warning from which he designed his longstanding screen name), and then gesticulating wildly with his genitals while reloading downloadable content. You will likely find in him a grand monologue of dorkdom from feverish, ongoing isolation. He needs you, you know, a poise of parole, and would treat you to his restoration, should you greet him more than the once, tonight and blind, to the misjudge of pictures, should you become happy with him and decide to quell the chessboard of your seldom pleasing days. You're no gourmet and you want to be in love. He's an intuitive kisser-at-the-door, you know.
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If It Should Happen
If it should happen that I believe too much, too, I'll grow a garden, a lighter lift, an animal of houses after the lady, tongue native, more smoke than fate, my head a landscape of cotton. If it should happen that I look away from her lovely eyes and feel the revolution color me, I'll only look into the rest from a garden of fires I needn't keep, but which will keep me looking, in a despairing happiness of distant neighbors, each bewildered equally and starlit with every fact.
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Paradiso
I have fidgeted under the heat lamp of twelve-thousand and eighty Earth-turns. In this time: Update ongoing never-ending announcement. Slowly sudden, uniquely repeating, days that do not rhyme and that rhyme. I take another meal promised me. Oxygen enters my hungry system like a thrown brick shoving apart a puddle's surface. The world I know is all extinct after.
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Little Trembler All the Time
She blinds the eye, nightly afternoon and a moon as if rich fat. Look—a wineglass emptied: Flagellating reverence. How warm and dim, her head on white. By bedtime she is spirit's solemn grave vomit in a bowl crackers to the couch stumble up the stairs stinking before a television— Are she and Thursday the only beings to expire so slow? She earlier walked like a band leader past an abandoned cottage in a forgotten faux glen. She had killed her afternoon kissing heather-met hills with her feet. Time has eaten her hopeless and deep into November. How wild. Pinned to the polystyrene and reeking of the solvent, her legs and arms spread and locked in scrutiny's favored posture, she bakes in warmth, exposed in the shrillest nights, her eye ever turned to the glens where the good folk tumble.
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Better Home and Garden
Hello, mower. You used to be a scythe. On a sun-dropped, pre-noon season of Spring that can't but finger faerie Mab senseless while the damp grass nibbles at her back, I tug your motor-cord and hear but coughs. “Get dressed. Cut grass,” I say, yanking the cord like twine from a ripe hayrick. I am to be the cynosure of my block— I'll buff my body with my neighbors' eyes. I used to be a swine promoter of wildness. Now I am an architect spider of decoration. Spring has neatly corrupted my lawn, now pied and pinched with weeds. A good lawn has no cronies, they believe, a good lawn is all green babies, and never checkered. Hello, mower. You hack up life and begin to sever; I get your blades drudging round to cut blades. Soon, I'll look good, a man in the landscape; front lawn trim, all babies, slender, short kids who tepidly nibble the tits of squat mums.
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A Masque Presented at the Bus Stop
CAST The Ignoble Commenter, of the gumption to borrow names. Network, his gang of manna, few, but here and there. Andrew. Corey. Felino. Several others who will seem to repeat glances at the Sun. *** In the opening scene is perceived a sky-jutting downtown. An intermediary state enters: Likely a municipal bus. The Ignoble Commenter steps from the bus or into it. The others are there, either inside or out. The bus departs. Ignoble Commenter: About this continuous music, the rejection of numerable notes... I'm for it like grouse to just-fell seed grain. Let's be demon shepherds or else mingle, profane or else religious, only keep at it. All present exchange looks. Each inserts or deletes the comment. The Sun-glancers have their upward look and return, as the bus continues. Ignoble Commenter: This feels good. I think let's keep it. The bus breaks down on the banks of meaning. Ignoble Commenter: Well, we're here.
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In the Performance of Your Indispensable Books
It takes a certain frailty of mind to allow the angling of an inaesthetic, or choice thought, to compose your chapters and make all your art. You fantasize and love this, but as with all fantasy, you do not suspect it is true. “Can't stand the heat, get out of the hardworking man; just bring home the climb, the ladder, and don't be a sucker born every sunrise, sunset. The bacon. Get over it, deal with it, grow a pair, perform, and then the bacon.� The object left by celebrity is a public property. Its creator is not often believed. Then we are left with a picture of Hart Crane, inconstant and a suggestion of great skill uttermost, eyes slit with red, then dead black beneath the bow of the Orizaba. We have the straightness of stout Hemingway's shotgun. With these you have your fantasy. You've looked into the box of ingenuity and found your strange meal. Look how it hangs in your thoughts. Eat well.
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In Labors of Conceit
He climbed atop a horse's back, saddled, and having broken down her fence, they shot into the right hand of the woods, temporary through a tree-brisk wild. Soon, with her tamed behavior of running, and with his nose for west, they reached a hawking town that wore the roads, the avenues ever-boarded by fence makers, busy folk, settled with carts to wildly browse the wares he had carried on his back while traveling on her back. He sang as he sold, he rapped on each object, subject, holding a gun and offering his vision. When he ran dry of goods, and dwindling in populebrity, he sold his cock and his ass, his vomit and spit; he sang in vainglorious shouts, gave himself a modern name, a smoky calm and manner. The horse was a beautiful woman, he knew, and he sold her face and legs, her backbone and hair, had her dance in his video to turn himself on coins, and again through the woods, for another, turning himself, and another. Goods. Wares. Property. Vision. It was public faith, a demand that tilted him so closely to the times. He checked his watch and watched more fences; the folk would require more hits, the folk would ask more albums. They would even buy him out of blood, if he opened a wound enough.
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Say Something Hot
She likes to hear about sex, knows people fill small rooms with it, battering nature against the walls, business, or a ransom for breath, the gathering of writhes or wrung loves. I tell her what I suspect. I jump to all the well-regarded fashions of the act, using preferable derogatories and valued gestures. She likes mentions, preferables, gestures. I keep back certain phantasms in my memory, to allow I still become enthused, as is right. I once knew a man who died choking with sex, organ retching in his palm as he strangled down on a neck-tie, tongue maddened from his lips and soon cold. He didn't let go of his king even then. Now it's as if he never existed. She likes to hear about sex. I do not tell her what I know.
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No, We are with the Others
We give such analysis, hence molting from their form a severity that is not, by hope's extent, to be ignored. We are all ignored and plainly hear companions. We have no need to divide our unusual guises. They are the marvel of our rules and murmuring, and intact, the faces we love to don fast and eat through. I seem to play an important part of myself, foolishly. It is how you and I bless fortitude, and therefore leave our reasons to lesser influence. The hour is turning round and round us; we note the hands obsessively, but the others have clocks, as well. No man is an exile who loves, but one of a sequence of astounding, other sorts. We are old fucks standing in the soul display, whomping in our wool and stamping where occasion asks for our two cents. We have never been apart from them, you know. Their long manuscript is interspersed with our commentary.
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In Sneers of Cold, Intermission
Bless the frost—the fat-headed domes that walk atop it, chatting before they stop to piss, in unison from alcoves in their first homes. Bless, bless all, orchid heads and fidgeting winds, not so, crushed by cold, not like a person, no, but bless, bless all, fuckwit smarts and lovely uglies, yes so, donning coats, yes a while, yes, wild affairs of clatter and cataclysm, zippers and hoods about necks and heads, each orgy of organs and orange-eyed hunger in the dulcet, frozen orchard where we are selected by the Sun above the space, and the ice beneath the life, which blesses all to be something of nothing at all.
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A Prettier Intermission
Our heads are packed with nowadays, and make so much of war fragments, loving creation and forever fragments, and withering into a sex with smarts, like cold-shy, shack's roof hornets. It's clever to screw, and cease sleeping a spell; less than half the way at a person brings back a multiplicative nature, turns crooks and parts to water, hands into dories— all the anxiety, all the lapse, in which neither I nor anyone else can stay alive for long.
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A Grand, Young Life
Albert is given a promotion, after being told someone named Nina died. When he reaches his new cubicle, there is a dead woman in the chair. He nudges her aside, from the chair to the floor. His new terminal is password-protected. He finds the password in Nina's purse. Later, he finds a box of sarcasm. Whenever he draws something from it, the statement satisfies people. His mother lives in a Home. He seldom visits. He has a home. He seldom stays. There is a drunk taking refuge in a washroom stall at work. The squatter lives there, gives drunkard advice in exchange for pints of Mad Dog. This is the previous CEO. He was thrown out on his ear for angering several smart people. A sneak, he had retained the washroom key. Albert brings him wine, asks for bits of wisdom. The ex-CEO swills and then sputters his toilet riddles: “Love your mother, young man. And stick up for yourself. You can piss on the dumb if you're sucking off the smart, but always watch the news. Never forget this.� That night, Albert drinks wine and watches the news. What he sees are very real stories, made to seem unavoidable, stories from the box of sarcasm, promoted by the wits in the wits of each paramount minute.
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When They Stop Where He Imagined
She looks at him, puzzled. Crickets watch. The moment eats the oxygen from his lungs. The woods stand rigid but the knees are all falsehood. The woods begin to shake. His nerves crawl under the rough; he does not ask. The crickets curl and dry.
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Accendo Matrimonium
To all with me that walk atop that perilous pond, to build on there, marry, since we cultivate with a nascent purity, oozing loves past locks— I say walk swift. The truth of it is crossed hands, crossed over, crossed eyes, half in urge, but half as if to cripple and shatter twilight before the day blows across, and be sweet-sounding still, smoothly a possession of the pond. To all, I say this boy's first notion was a disturbed laugh. He was wrong.
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Rabbit and Warren
Where the boundary lies I can not say, bending back as snapped birch spine, where the perches of the real meet the fattened crucible of an imagination. I commit there is no boundary; I can not establish any angle to it. No cliff face plummet from fantasy into truth. No one creating the other, no recursion, no cartilage of thought. A speaking rabbit of myself works a coffee pot. When I sip from a cup, past my whiskers, the coffee chortles down into my warren. I stand thirty foot tall, or one, I wake for a thousand years, or one. You could express to me the absurdity of my statements, if you were any more to me than the swarm of more. Doubt. That's the boundary. You for me, I for all. The line between dream and rouse is doubt, and I locked this song outside my ears long ago.
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An Unrelenting Hush
What ugly cake, what overblown balloons, having collected the gross of tabulated night, by three-hundred sixty-five, and how beneath this gavel is my specter, and how after-the-fact am I agreed to have aged. Perhaps I'll change my name to Nathemore. The cake's stinger candle bears my number, and allows neither allegory nor aperture— I am stuck in the cake with my head exposed. My wife leans over, strikes the thin match; the fire that draws at my hair is highly educated. “Blow,” she says. All becomes quiet.
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Stay Close, the Morning Hurries
I am at the night's end where dried men are lifted from smoke and tasted, where evening's yolk welters out its orchestrating ants and early risers. You are with me at the night's end where the droving and swatting and grating eat last, where we nudge day's overflow from the ramekin's rim, a bed, a settlement of each thought's crumpled trellis, the night's end in a dally at the seams, where dimness is a pursuit of britches, and the sinuous stretch of babies slips quietly from the lea.
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I Have Been Much Indebted To It
When you entered the world, I became culpable. How did this occur? They flattened out my wife on a table, and I watched them cut her wide open, gutting her, pulling intestines out, and shoving things around, right in front of me, and I blinked, right outside of me, and could not think straight or breathe, and I looked at my wife's face and she was terrified, asking in a stutter if all was well, and I swallowed and dizzied and muttered “It's— it's fine. Everything's fine.” and then they hoisted from her entrails an eleven pound monstrosity of a miniature primate, lifting another fucking person out of my wife, and I blinked some more and thought to fall over. Then, the torture circus of knives and grotesquery had abated, and they walked from the room with you and wheeled off with my wife. I just stood there until someone wearing a mask pointed a blood-soaked hand at the door and told me to get out. I drifted through a hall, or was it a channel? The surf of the floor pressed me at glass. I was beckoned into a sealed room. Wailing creatures everywhere, and mine. I knelt over and knew what to say. My mind had sharpened. I said the right thing and you were pleased. How did this occur? When you entered the world, I became culpable.
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Sweets and Sicks
Today, my son has a small mouth full of little things, a cashmere mouth, a powerless gold, opening for an educated man, an exultation who happened at Princeton. “Give me an 'ah'.” Given, crawling what it is, news, subject, perquisite of a contagion— But a blue candy has stained the tongue's pink. The doctor gasps, then settles. “Candy recently?” “Oh, sorry,” I commit. “It's all right. I see now. Well, he's quite inflamed.” Jaggedly. Livery. Now lavender inside. “So what do we do?” I ask. “Candy and antibiotics.” My son alights in the eyes at this. He is half the way to well.
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For Peppery Guards of Well-Perched Eyes
Things have swiveled, force of February, who from day-slip and cuckoo's dawn has all my hail. The tackle of youth is a stark desire, kept as air in wood and dale, as grass on a hill, and for relief? I have no reason why— no, for welcome, and sprawling play, for peppery guards of well-perched eyes on the tank town brink I have kept. I note our dim and uncut gems belong to a slow pulse of whim and warmth. If I have forgotten something, it is dispensable, or else remind me; things have swiveled, force of February; more than many forces, there is now every reason to love.
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Autopsy
Little of the coast-headed back end fondles cough to life in the Timber Inn Tavern, but they impress the air in stapler jaws warping up karaoke songs and drunkenly sensating their reviewers. A bucktoothed woman donkey-brays she’s horny, and a bounder scratches his red spotty pants. One minute perfecting sips. One minute scrawling the restroom. One minute Napoleon shouts at a girl and one minute more, a locksmith who had her. Few of them— each with a prawn tongue up from the craw, a white face, brown around eyes, yellow fingers, a dry lip and body hair spots… some few of them raid mornings anymore and some fewer still are righted a peacefulness. You enter and you pageant with declassified sayings— It’s the literal person who seems unique first.
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Nowaday Spry
Where colic toys antiquate the ephemeral gods, where the sight of one's old ills the spider he wishes to become, where no quick of a hand can bring profound edict anymore. All have been given the might of the shrug. We are so modern, cover pups that don't greet much, but for wags and sniffs, then off in electronic retire. Today we are so modern. A woman I know is not what I know. I will annotate her as not doing what I am doing. The world opens and we fuck in the vestment. The world opens as we close— we are so modern.
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Evolution
The concrete chips its flecks up into dolls of Nietzsche and Marie Curie, of Edison and Sandburg. The steel rails rust a powder pool of Doppler and Nobel, of Virgil and Perseus. By a war some reporter is removed his head. Impossible, it says, impossible impossible. The lungs evolve their tongue its clicks and lips event the phonym. The head is shown online from the war. Impossible, it says, impossible.
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Breakthrough
I am buying a man with ingenuity in his skull, scouting him devices for a desk legacy. Where he will sit is a wheeled prow, and he will devour his pageantry in type. The man was an escaped parlor-boy until chewed into adulthood. His tag is but scratches— I purchase him cheap. I dress him for the eye and gainsay his confidence, I toss him books, spoiling, mooring him to sap-thick text, and sick him on an unprotected first draft. I leave him in the room, close the door, flesh behind wood, a crackle in black, and for ruminant work soon, soon. In time I can hear the chair squeak, the tap of keys, the closing of reference and the beginning of work. “Oh thank you, fuck, thank you...” I mutter, relieved he has found the extraordinary source.
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On the Larger Humor
All riddles, all jokes, all atoms of imagination are riddled with relation, are joked at first in cradles and later in a sundering reunion, or else the human irrigation. All mothers and delicious, breathy riches over princes, doghead shouters, the minister or general above crumbling sacks of boys, jokes, all riddles coined but as brains to scope an inch of time's possession; atoms and imagination, all jokes truths, credibly in a rigorous appetite. And so some men rise to the height of a Christ crucified, and some women, prodigal and more, lift in all shapes deputed, amassed and amazed, fell or foul and born so easily, all women and men and history, all later in cribs, and before, in final lines.
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Slop
In a ramshackle sow-pen, I nudge mud with my boot, having designed the water, soil, pen, and even my pig self. Beyond me, in paltry molds, bursts of my offspring— these do not impress you, I know; I've been a young boy many times now, and even at the point of losing my hair, I still toy with trucks and build deathtraps with blocks, I jump illogically, I boo and hit, sending marbles down small corridors to knock aside human miniatures. My pen is broad and the mud is rich— this does not impress you; you're a pig, as well. Like our young, we but note each other's hooves and stamp as if boars.
45 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
The List of the Wharf
There was, if by tails of dangerous rays my palm might meet, five means to bleed beside my father. Cast fishhooks zipping through the air past ears and eyes, dramatic slippage on wet wood into the bay far below, the pincers of tiny beasts armed and in threatening stances, sharp buck knife for cutting lines and frozen baitfish... I knew four (the stingrays never tore me): My hand's jerk was at the drag of a hook through the webbing. I slipped and struck my mouth on the pier, made a bleeding windflower on dark, worn wood. The large-clawed, armored devils got me near to the month, and the knife knew my flavor, rifting through my thumbs like a keel through whitecaps. And so I would bleed and suck the temper from the slits and smashes and punctures, shivering on the taste of red iron and bay cold. At night, we would consume the small lives we had captivated. This sea life meal to me tasted the same as my substance, no matter what was added, and despite how I grew.
46 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
In the First Person
If there is vignette in my head's book, it is for myself— An ego is brutes and fruits, a cruel divinity to brandish the self, but best anymore; I tip-tap hide, pry into my image when alone, looking for the bay leaf in some cook’s meat, wondrously selfish, seeking to uncover the attractor parts, the eat-dog parts, those who have peaceably stepped into our non-ballast censure; I play modest only when you're around, and I know you do the same. There are those who feel watched enough to banish themselves out of themselves— A look into selfishness finds the perch of the jigsaw that is thought to introduce a neck-slit to new culture, or a many-culture of the brisk, which cannot begin to be remembered. This makes more strangers, and so I adopt cruel divinity, I eat myself and stay moving, patron myself, a security of me, and in who's awkward form I grow hot-wild and distinct.
47 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Subtle Bends and Snapping Bands
While one prefers to murmur, her husband by the common-law is satisfied with but a grunt. Their noises bend from them slowly. Old music plays— music still, but warped by the pass of its era, theirs, to make room for a next heave of ducky dearies. Some of these are shooting pool in the back. A laugh jerks from them like a snapped rubber band. In the a.m., when familiar voice informs them last call and their direction out, she nods her head where her shoulders rest, drunk, as he lifts his shaky glass and gesture. “To your health,” he mumbles.
48 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
The Manner of a Low Sky-Creep
And the manner of the monotone, the undercast white, and the spitting, gravid, wallowing gourd of mist that brings grim moods and coats, the stirring cold, the white or flippant grey, Winter, this shrill cult of submission to cold. The sputum beetles down, not all at first, then all. The Fall is gone, having stood before horns blowing misery, left us in a suspension, after and under its tepid warmth, as Winter bitches her fingers in the earth, and turns us over to the long and hard way.
49 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
A Body of Work
Where Autumn glutted on Summer's leave, and heat, no scholar, shadowed through glassy squares, is where the ash of my parents peppered the sea some time ago. I exist in a home that is without me, but have made it a stable or calf-house— I've offspring, Spring's jaunt, and let my son glut; I heat him with antics, no, not serious, not intellect or artistry— Joy. I wrote him as I was written; I can not edit, my parenting is quest-less, a Summer making Spring, with a beloved heat that is both ancient and novice.
50 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
A Prince the Day
I drank in human form from a driveway puddle, was a prince. When I wiped my mouth, cats nudged my legs and bare feet. I had a toddler son that leaped over sprinklers then; not every child could walk, and so mine laughed and pointed. There was a woman at the edge of my yard, her Summer hide damp from mowing a lawn and tugging loose thistles. Where was my yard? It was not a father's yard. When did I drink? I was never a thirsty man. The boy struck his head and curled. The hills fled and the sky raised, wiping their mouths. The woman hurried her kisses upon me. I drank from the sprinkler. I drank from the house.
51 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
5th Street Uttermost
All our nights are astonished, accidental and behind the day; chopped out, missing fingers, Hell's cloudburst in mooncast: I and my neighbors seem to be a dim light, thickly slender, a thousand concise rambles. If we do as our handiwork suggests, mourning nothing, we mourn that, and find no hurrah in our era's palette. If we lie, over-mourn, paintings of clarinets claiming you can hear the doubtful notes— we only crackle to bits with such feeling. Loudly serene or hushed and hysterical, we stare into our scene, aiming at American, zeppelin-headed in transfiguring wind, and seek out nothing drastic on middle ground. All these days are mule-backed, half-way days; we look at each other, see ceilings seeming to hold back water, though all the driplets drop at once, like the anger from the four corners of our mad and glittering eyes.
52 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Out
No rife street leads home at eight. I've gone out, townward as thousand cars, but there is no pave I bed, no road-as-door— I am lost on streets that don't go straight. I am underground atop them, a swimmer scarlet pilgrim; I have charted the intersections and their hyperbolized tails, I have counted footfalls and kept bird and beast from breadcrumbs. The streets are fraudulent— neither earth nor sky, but sources of painfully descript gushes of tar. I can't find my house. It is wounded on a river of black, cooling on the amplification deluxe. The moon begins to gorge on a trim dark, as my seisms commence, felt only by lamp-lit moths. It keeps getting later. Apprehension has curled over me, and I walk, I leave behind more and more moseyed streets, a descent into the scissures of ever-foreign hills.
53 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Eftsoons
In my householding years— but slab and wall time topped with a plat of white, and a head of scaly shingles, I have transformed, like you, and beat my youth against a pillory in open plains. To prevent its recurrence, reviving naivety, I bleach my thoughts in mundanity. Like you, this eye and this, I look over and am looked over, that we shop in each other a culture. Soon after jejune perils, some prank their middle days, and others bring down prick, a tension of wire between self and the vista— yet in where I try to clean my skull of height or angle, a scenery lives. All my hellos. Footers with songs, like you, pass into and through this gory, white brain, rutted in character, meaning echo. We are soon after youth, in all ways after the tenacious cornerstone, here, so soon and soon after.
54 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Big Booth Cuddle
He rollicked in the 4X, gourmand man-balloon, just slobbin' the plates of meaty flow. His yelling tummy burped a note, twenty jamborees of day-day hunger, then bantam stamps of dumpy feet, in the restaurant, big booth cuddle, squelching and drag-scooting buttocks around a table. His fatty rotundus was full of gelbwurst tubes, of legs all jiggle and tits all tickle; Roland the beflumped, Roland the stubby bubbler, roley-poley Roland with a fist of clustered nuts at night. His fat-breads tripped sweat in a swamp-scented buzz, clues to a passive active missive glisten life, savory, heavenly, bunching bound of balls and handles. His bass-mouth eyes and gouty bulges plungered, at times, into gravy, a hoggish quagmire of flavor sliding down to further plug up the grungy pipes of Roland, the dugong man. His sumpy, damp crack where the undies crimped in were a drapery pulp of britches on a thigh-moat. Roland in a deli, a flappy-armpit limper, a strutless, plump chugger, squatty Roland in struggled breaths as he waved from the torso, neck-to-neck slide, and gave drip-whiffs of leaky back-sweat on air. He euphemistically described himself a larger man.
55 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
A Night About Periwinkle
Periwinkle struck me pregnant, when late in May, I fell asleep beneath this color. Had I governance in stunting atop it, I might have ceased the prestige and taken prudence, but I've no overseer in the passionate process, and with an unprotested whim, ran up Periwinkle's side with my own, turned, and came. Shortly thereafter, I was gratified and warm. That color from the miserly addition of blue to a culpable lavender, stung a child into me, and by mid-swell, I was seen through the baby window: “Got a mate?” I'd be asked. “I don't,” I'd reply, “but a pensive strand of color, and it's in there deep.” The baby shook the ribs and clasped my backbone, banging fists against the shutters and howling up my throat. It's father had gone, and it knew. Many years drank up my posture, turned my legs wiry and slunk into my looks, before I met with Periwinkle again. I had more governance, kept clear of passionate process. My son, Indigo, then a pastel man beside me, had his old father's tint, but his eyes kept close to the shade of his mother.
56 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
The Six-Month Job
“What are you reading over there?” Stark asked me in the mop-damp Alzheimer's hall, 2nd Floor South, perpendicular between our dormant caregiver stations. “This blue 'Welcome Aboard' letter they gave me today.” “No, you're not. That's your red termination slip.” I turned the page over and examined its face. So it was. My termination slip. The late night was tepidly crooked about alarms, alarms based on beds feeling movement or moisture. We waited for them, then ran. Alarm was everywhere at random. An old man urinated in bed; his alarm sounded, ten seconds. Another old man moved to the edge of his room; his finger tapped at a window for two hours. I went in, drew down sheets, wiped them, changed the beds. I went out, drew a lighter, smoked quickly, came back damp. Six months approached. “First shift on 2nd South, huh?” Stark asked. “Yes, but I'm very eager to do a good job here,” I replied. “No, you're not. You hate this job.” I lifted my eyes to the clock; six months had passed. So I did. I hated the job. The 2nd floor elevator opened before me and I entered. “Where do you think you're going?” he asked. Stark was in love with questioning. “This was my last shift,” I explained, “I was fired; I'm leaving.” “No, it's not. You got hired; this is your first shift.” The doors closed, remaindering me in a small compartment dropping down without a true, human plane. So it had been. The first shift. Over and over again.
57 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Why so Abstract
There is a pygmy rodent that inhabits my hand. Where she once subsisted on bits of callus and nail fibers, she now sets her biting to the little chords I write, and with a belly sated on these compounds, now sleeps more than she did, doing her bathrooms in my wrist, having her ugly children up my arm, and sending her chatty mail to addresses in my other limbs. Through a dream, I intercepted one such letter, wherein she explained I was no longer a good man, and that she was suffering from my abstract work, the hand's blood was too thick, the calluses were too thin. I long ago decided I wouldn't breathe for her, and she will soon have to surface. When she does, her pygmy head will split apart a pore. Her whiskers will itch the outside, wake me, and I'll tear her out, you know, I'll toss her to geniuses with nowhere else to go but into the midst of hand rodents. My hand will be injured but empty, and I'll send her off poisoned, in the manner one kills a magnificent thing: slowly, and with numerous changes of heart.
58 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Kiss My Conceit
Vainly, for a fear of heights I began climbing houses, and vainly, for a love of drink I cut its rhythm, and ate vinegar covered produce while hating vinegar, and deduced an atheism for a love of deities, and fucked all the prehistoric fucks, my divinity, my arbitrary vanity, and edged the razor and inched the stresses, messmate husband with an augmented tress of coily brain, leveling myself for a love of others, leaving others for a lust of my swellhead self, vain yet extramural, slipping yet committing. This arrogance has left me in casual bliss, and led the tumble-down condition of my English, and let my irresolvable fears remain lonesome. Is it so swollen to believe myself worth bettering? Perhaps this rude quality is in nature classical, but never has it been by any means peculiar.
59 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
Heavier than Air
Leaward or in shade have I slept the nights, closer by each, to a dim and grand dream, eyes latched shut and sent down passages more subtle than shapeless grades of fog. If I tamper myself thin and steadily shit away my wiles, a peeled lime of panic aired as an art, but wobbling, fearful, I waste ballast, I tip and dab my nose into that froth that tops the surf I hoped, as a boy, to glide over. I no longer glide; I have flapped my arms busted and bony, pure, pure, you see, sinking and pure. Leaward I rest, in shade or divorced by each previous minute. I will glide again tomorrow. I'm there and I'm here, and sleep yesterday was short; tonight's sleep will be short. Look now, I am not gone long, or here long, if you do not look.
60 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s
61 | O t h e r C r u e l T h i n g s