CATERWAULING. a poetry book by Jonah Ort.
CREDITS: Cover Art done by Zac Simon. Doodles done by Madison Smith.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Google for helping me spell the word ‚caterwauling‛
The Alt-Lit community for being infinitely supportive
Madison Smith for being infinitely inspirational
Tumblr for creating a place to share my writing
California for being crowded and poetic
Arizona Southern Style Sweet Tea
‚...So there must be another, more convincing name for innocence, the kind the body never lost, the grace of stumbling through an open door.‛ -Ruth L. Schwartz, from Hieroglyphics on
a Branch of Peach
Caterwauling, or, ‚Why the title completely matters.‛ I believe having an evocative title is important. A title should say as much as it can about whatever it’s titling. I chose the word ‚caterwauling‛ for a number of reasons. The word makes me think of a story from when my family and I moved houses one summer. On the first night my two cats were walking around all night howling, confused and scared in a foreign place. When a cat caterwauls it is either because it is scared or wants to have sex. Isn’t that sad and strange? I think if humans were cats we’d all be caterwauling almost constantly, really. Some psychologists propose that the two biggest motivators for human beings are the fear of death and the longing for sex. Cats express it in such a direct, dramatic way. I think everybody is caterwauling in different ways and through different venues and I want to reflect on that, at least a little bit.
Upscalator I kissed her goodbye and sent her crying into my left shoulder. I couldn’t muster more than an ‚I love you‛ though there had been a novel wedged in my brain for some time now. I kept it together as I walked into the crowded airport until I reached the escalator going up towards security. I cried like a baby in front of a stern-faced TSA agent who checked my I.D. and moved me along through the checkpoint. When I got through security I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t get myself to pee. Sometimes when you hold something in for so long it doesn’t end up coming out.
Sunset Ending 6:45AM wake up wake up into the bathroom for a shower in the dark, pitch black so I can’t see a thing, hoping this will be the time I finally fall asleep standing up. It wasn’t this time so I throw on clothes and shut off my alarm clock still ringing, still trumpeting to a barrack housing only one. Upstairs my mother pissed her pants, laying down on the couch, deflated like on those anti-drug commercials, except no one is asking her to get up or straighten out.
There is only me sitting on the loveseat adjacent, making sure my cereal doesn’t get too soggy while Matt Lauer tells me the tragedies of the world: that there are worse things out there than a deflated mother, and that there are worse things than alcoholism and high school and soggy cereal. That’s why I get up in the morning, really. I think I owe it to Matt Lauer to get up in the morning if it’s the least I can do.
Jeff Mangum Is Playing ‚Engine‛ Underneath The Bed Jeff Mangum is playing ‚Engine‛ underneath the bed. It is 4:33 AM and I have just woken up. My girlfriend is asleep next to me and I can make out the details of her face and her shoulders if I squint the right way. Jeff Mangum sings the first verse of ‚Engine‛ and his voice is beautiful. I am looking at her face and I run my index finger across her cheek. It is soft and warm and I kiss it without waking her up. It tastes like warm milk with vanilla extract. My arm is around her belly. Some of her hair is covering my chin but I don’t brush it off. I put my fingers into the palm of her right hand. She murmurs something in her sleep and I couldn’t quite hear it but I bet it was something very endearing and remarkable.
A car’s headlights beam through the window and they illuminate her like an angel. Julian Kostner is playing the singing saw; it sounds like the voice of God and her breaths are the only thing keeping Him on beat. I make a little promise involving the word ‚forever‛ and I nestle my head against her chest. Jeff Mangum is singing about babies and milk and birth imagery and for a minute or two I know exactly how he feels.
Algernon I’m on a bus listening to emo music while the pine trees swoop up down, up down like birds of prey, picking up squirrels and mice like kids to toy cars. I wanna drive a toy car some day to stop wasting money on bus-tickets, and I wanna be a mouse that gets picked up by a hawk and carried across the Midwest sky; I wonder if that little mouse thought that it could fly.
In Airplanes I will love you when my legs broken and I am at home alone. I will think of you watching shitty television, drinking ginger ale, healing. I will miss you in airplanes, when my thoughts shake the plane, mightier than turbulence. I will miss you in busses, I will be the rain that makes us fifteen minutes late to the destination. But I cannot delay flights or bus rides or cause earthquakes, but I can make myself carsick writing poetry about you.
Death Rattle Cruise control at seventy-miles per hour laying across the back seat. I’m very tired. I’m very tired of a lot of things, some things upset me but most just make me sleepy. ‚Is he still awake?‛ ‚I don’t think so, I don’t know. Hey, are you awake?‛ I didn’t say anything. I could die back here. I could die in the back of this car and nobody would know. I’d be dead for at least three hours before they had any idea.
We stopped at a gas station several more miles down the road. I got up to get boiled peanuts and a bottle of soda. ‚How did you sleep?‛ ‚Awful.‛
Submarine I wonder if I played Call of Duty during an anxiety attack, would I play any better? Instead I'll lay in my bed lofted 6 feet above the floor and 1 below the ceiling (I pretend that I'm a soldier on a submarine leagues below the sea with a wife and a baby in Ohio waiting for me) As my stomach churns I pretend it's seasickness and nothing more sinister or complicated or cruel than that.
Ink Is Heavy College me would’ve hated high-school me and high-school me would’ve hated middle-school me and that’s exactly the reason why I couldn’t get a tattoo. Ink has signed death sentences, ink is permanent like death (that’s why I write in pencil anyway; erasers to the nub). I will die someday and before that I will have changed my mind a million plus times, I’ll have been a million different people in little ways. Plus, ink is heavy. My skin would sag at the weight of its implications. Some people say they pick images that sum themselves up. How could you let yourself be summed up? You are not a sum. You are dynamic, fluid, like drops of ink into a stream, spreading out into nothing.
Like a Razor, Like a Ruler The other night I went for a walk through campus. I got lost fairly quickly and soon enough I accidentally wandered uptown by the bars and by the drunk people. I passed a group of girls heading home, a mob stumbling in perfect harmony. As I passed by I heard one of them say ‚I don’t know, I think I’d fuck him!‛ and the rest just started giggling. One of them shouted ‚I’m sorry, she’s drunk!‛ There was a group of muscular guys with shaved heads and letterman jackets that were probably 5 or 6 years old shouting ‚We want some puss-ay!‛ in unison.
As I passed by the hookah bar a small short-haired girl stumbled out the door dressed in footie pajamas that were shaped like a teddy bear. She squinted around and quietly asked ‚Does anyone have a cigarette?‛ to no one in particular. She went back in before I could offer her one but it was probably for the better. A friend of mine has a brother that was born without enough oxygen to his brain and he had an IQ of about 47 because of it and I wondered if I brought him here if he would be envious.
How To Love Yourself, An Instructional Guide My ex-girlfriend is very drunk and is very angry at me and is yelling very loudly but all I can think about is how I’ll never have Mountain Dew Pitch Black again, because the formula is different each time they reissue the stuff and it got me thinking about how fleeting and impermanent everything is, and about how much of a child I still am and it made me giggle and she says ‚What the fuck are you laughing at?‛ and I say still giggling ‚How much of an idiot I am‛ and she replies ‚Good, because you’re a fucking idiot‛ and all I could do is giggle.
Adequacy I’m sitting in class getting choked up on Robert Frost’s ‚Birches‛: I remember having two birch trees in my yard when I was seven, running at the speed of an idiot and gripping the coarse limbs, skinning my hands and scraping my knuckles (there’s a white nick above my left index finger still), nearly breaking my back on the roots underneath the branch that scoffs at my immature agony. When the branch dips down and snaps up as I fall, the leaves rattle about and make the sound of ripping paper. A little Robert Frost walks home without bloody knuckles, and I want to ask if he has any tips.
Fucked Entirely She is sleeping passively-aggressively next to me while Middle School lights up a cigarette and puts its hand on my shoulder. ‚You are fucked entirely--‛ it mocks. "It's been four years since you've been 13. Did everything come together? Did the stars align? Was it everything you ever wanted?" Middle school takes a drag on the cigarette, laughs quietly to itself, and turns away. I am twelve years old looking at a pair of tits on a PSP in my bedroom alone. I don’t know how I feel but I keep looking. Now I am five years old and I am trapped inside one of those turtle-shaped sandboxes with the lid on top inside a church classroom. The sunday school children can’t pry the plastic lid off and have to tell the overly-agreeable teacher lady that I am stuck, and that we are all probably in a lot of trouble, and when the teacher lady pries the lid off everyone is staring at me in a circle thinking I could’ve suffocated and died inside that cramped, plastic, out-of-place turtle-shaped sandbox.
I emerge as if from out of the womb into the forgiving fluorescent light of life. I was happy in there, I want to go back. But right now it is dark and she is asleep and I am awake and the locked door to the bedroom opens and in comes the 40-year-old version of myself. He sits down on the bed beside me and puts his hand on my knee: ‚It gets better.‛ I stare into my own tired eyes and nod yes. I pat myself on the back reassuringly and walk out of the room, closing the door behind me, fucked entirely.
Journal Entry, Year 2011 I smell like river water and slow death. Slow death and river water and pine-scented rearview-mirror air fresheners. My knees cut like a sober straight-razor, clean as broken mirror. I am greater than or equal to a dusty computer, a bold faced liar, hyperbolizing guttermouth, a story-truther. I am a glowstick newly cracked and a sticker sniffed and scratched and my color is blue raspberry and my scent is slow death and river water.
Angry Atheists When I was little I would see the sun shining beams of light through openings in the clouds. I thought they were bits of Heaven leaking down into our world. Now I know that it’s the light refracting through the particles of water in the clouds, making it visible. I don’t know which explanation is better. In fact I think I like them both equally.
Shrug The people in the other room are playing pop music and it’s times like these where I really become an asshole. and this is the part where I shrug my shoulders; can I brag that I can pass out from two cigarettes? can I brag that espresso makes me vomit? can I brag that I can shotgun a Mountain Dew? (I still believe there will be a can of Mountain Dew that’ll contain my soul; I’ll drink it and become whole) but that’s besides the point and most things are beside the point, like writing poems or shrugging shoulders or throwing up or watching television or breaking bones or holding hands or loving people: I’m told the point is is that we’re all going to die eventually, or at least that’s what this pop song is telling me. (I shrug my shoulders at death, too, you know, the last thing I’ll do before I die is shrug my shoulders)
Blips When the spirits of the world scream out their cries are only heard as little blips on radar, static on your telephone long-distance and the hiss on the recording equipment, we get pissed and edit but I believe they still try and they still find ways to misplace your keys or make you sneeze or blur your photos; we don’t grow up to be businessmen or bankers we grow up to be ghosts, clambering toward the outside edges of photos taken by the unstable and non-trustable, or in the night-vision camera lenses of cheesy late night television shows, as the psychics frantically point at the screen screaming "See! See?" we laugh at the idiocy of it all. We're here, we're there, we're everywhere, you just haven't looked underneath your bed yet.
Coffee Vending Machines I go to the coffeshop at the university library and order this drink called a ‚Cocoa Joe‛: it’s ½ chocolate milk and ½ black coffee. It tastes exactly like that. It’s name is evocative of some limited-edition flavored coffee you’d see sold at Burger King in 2003. As a child I’d use this coffee vending machine in my grandfather’s office building and get hot chocolates (it’d let you choose the amount of sugar used in the drink, I’d set it to the highest level). Now I enjoy the bitterness of jet-black coffee. It tells me ‚You are here, this is real life, hot and bitter and grounding.‛
My grandfather drank his coffee black, looking cool and calculated in a beige desk chair, not just sipping a cup of coffee, no; he would transcend that cup of water strained through ground beans, he took that beverage and turned it into something more than himself, black like oil used to lubricate an engine that pumps out determination, passion, and an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility to work and work and support the people that he loves and do his absolute best to instill these values within his grandson peering over from afar with a cup of hot chocolate in his little hands. He knew exactly what it means to be a ‚grown up‛, and it all started with a single cup of coffee.
Carry My Skeleton Back To Me Carry my skeleton back to the sea. Carry my skeleton back to me. Carry it atop Stone Mountain, let the sun wash my skull of all its little stains. Drag it through the streets of Atlanta, down the drag of Little Five Points, into every record store and coffeeshop and overpriced restaurant (give my fingers to the homeless, they need them more than I do). Sling it over your shoulder and hike up and down the Blue Ridge Mountains. Carry my skeleton to Tennessee. Carry my skeleton back to me. Put it in a canoe and paddle down the Chattanooga, the Hiwassee, the Nantahala. Throw it off Norris Dam, skidding down the wall of concrete (manmade and ugly and beautiful, strong as a mountain, weaker than TNT). Carry my skeleton through Kentucky. Carry my skeleton back to me. Sling it on a thoroughbred and have it ride through to West Virginia. Buy it a ticket on a steamboat and have it ride halfway up the Potomac.
Take it on a detour to Washington, D.C., up the elevator of the Washington Monument, down Embassy Row, let the history sink into my bones. Take it for a ride on the metro. Carry my skeleton to Lake Erie. Carry my skeleton back to me. Drive it up I-75 to Cincinnati, dying slowly, so slowly, as the Ohio River sings it a lullaby. Drive it to Youngstown among the broken buildings and rotting concrete. Drive it to Akron, a baby phoenix, rising up from a pool of ash and shredded rubber. Carry it to Lake Erie. Carry it to where the snow mixes in with the runoff. Every drop of blood on the sidewalk, every cigarette flicked out a car window, every broken bottle of beer, every tear; it all goes home to the watershed. That’s where you’ll find me. That’s where I’ll be.
Family Dorms An old dorm building got torn down the other week. It had been built in the 70’s but it’s been abandoned for quite some while. It used to be the ‚family dorms‛, where college students that were already married or had children would live. It’s a parking lot now. It’s difficult to imagine that there would only be cement in the place that I raised my child, or lived with my wife. It’s important to remember the memories of places. The sound of a newlyweds living in a shoebox, or a wailing infant soon calmed down by its mother. I hear these things from time to time, sound travels better through flat areas, and maybe, with luck, the memories can spread over the flattened terrain, settling like rushing blue water into a calm grey sea.
Time Travel To Me I want you to time travel to me when I was sixteen. Slap me in the face and kiss me. Take my hand and tell me there's no time to explain.
The Old Man I woke up to my air conditioner sounding like it’s about to vomit, it sputtered for a second then turned back on and continued to hum its life story in my tiny room. Apparently they installed these things in the nineteen-nineties and I often think about the twenty-plus people my air conditioner conditioned for. I hope it served as beautiful background music to people making love, to a fight, to a frantic study session. If my air conditioner did vomit I would put my hand on its shoulder, run to CVS and buy it some Pepto Bismol and brew some tea in the microwave; but the old man just kept humming and I listened until I fell asleep again.
Miles of Magma I am sad and I am naked and the juxtaposition is wonderful. I am naked and my socks are on. I always keep my socks on when I’m naked, I tiptoe about feeling weightless because they act as a buffer between me and the earth. Buffers are good when I can afford them. They keep me from not quite touching the earth but close enough to feel its presence and be reminded that this is where I stand, naked in my room with miles of dirt and magma beneath the cotton on my feet. Everyone needs socks. And everyone should walk on their toes, not in order to make quick getaways, but to more firmly plant their heels in the ground.
On The First Chapbook I kicked the can off of Where The Sidewalk Ends and chanced the jump down the little cliff on the cover, falling into a hole deep enough to hold me, into a pile of crumpled notebook pages, softening the fall, though not completely. I broke my left elbow but that is not my writing arm, so that I wrote frantically but with sound purpose until I raised up what resembled a poem, glistening off the sunbeams that shone downwards. I called out for help from the bottom of the hole but my words fell short like a million brave haikus written on the sides of homework to be turned in. All I could do was write my way out, and that is what I did. I wrote until I was out of that hole and put it out for people to read, Climbing out is always fun when there’s people topside waiting for me.
Folktales My grandmother told me a story the other day. A long time ago she was a terrible alcoholic and in rehab. She suffered from anxiety attacks and needed care very often. The caretakers in the hospital she was staying at were almost all former alcoholics themselves. She told me of this one caretaker she had; a large, stern black fellow that she felt intimidated by. He would often raise his voice and frighten her and she did not like him at all. One day she was having a panic attack and was pacing about in circles clutching her head, scared out of her mind. The gruff caretaker grabbed hold of her arm; not too hard, but enough to stop her. Then he grabbed her other arm and went in close. ‚Take a breath. Slow down. Easy does it.‛ She took a breath, she slowed down, she took it easy, and the panic attack ceased. She left the hospital a few days later and hasn’t had a drink since. (These are the stories I will tell my children and my children’s children. These are the folktales of the new generation. What better place to find idols than within your ancestry? Inspirational figures are everywhere if we’d only look over our shoulders)
There Were Christmas Lights Strung Above Her Headboard There were books nailed to her bedroom walls-broken film cameras hung like posters while thumbtacks held up photographs. Our clothes were scattered lifeless on the floor. There were christmas lights strung above her headboard-turning her bedroom into a page ripped out of an I-Spy book, surreal and jumbled and beautiful as two naked bodies lay on a queen sized bed covered in sheets with cherries printed on them. I looked her over, got overwhelmed, smiled, and said ‚Cool.‛
Poetry can’t do justice to the meaning I put behind that word. Poetry can’t do a single fucking thing about it, it falls short, it seizes me to write this down for posterity, saying ‚Be sure to use ‘like’ or ‘as’!‛ but I did no such thing. Because poetry isn’t a warm bed and body and christmas lights with everything swathed in red and pink and yellow and green, death and life and love cascading across sheets with cherries printed across them. Poetry isn’t the clothes on the floor, poetry can’t describe their joy. She smiled and said ‚Cool‛ back. And that was the end of the poem and the beginning of something else. There were christmas lights strung above her headboard.
Shucks.