Babylon Burning

Babylon Burning

Poems by Tyler Wettig

© 2020 Tyler Wettig

Published by Third I Press: thirdipress.wordpress.com

This book was designed by the author using Microsoft Publisher. Fonts used are Calibri, Palatino, and Tahoma.

The cover art by Stella Langdale resides in the public domain and was curated via the British Library. ___________________________________________________

Tyler Wettig resides in Michigan, where he has worked in elementary and higher education. His poetry, prose, and photography have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has given talks and led workshops at numerous schools and conferences.

Also by Tyler Wettig:

Men in Togas Looking at Fruit (Zetataurus Press, 2016)

The Adult Table (Zetataurus Press, 2018)

https://www.tylerwettig.wordpress.com

https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/tyler_wettig

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks the following publications in which the poems in this volume originally appeared, sometimes in different forms:

Bleached Butterfly: “The Morning After” and “Spectral”

Boo!: “The Coma Tapes”

Commonplace: “Postmodern Epigram”

Dear Reader Poetry: “On Being (I)”

The Future: “Dollhouse Arson”

Mojave Heart Review: “Exodus” and “Man on Fire III”

Nine Muses Poetry: “Creature,” “Pondering Impressionism,” and “Portrait”

The Pangolin Review: “Babylon Burning,” “Infernal,” and “On Being (II)”

Pulp Poets Press: “Failed Sonnet for the Unmarried”

Rasputin: “Drone,” “Inferno,” “Pondering Romanticism,” and “Reckoning”

Twist in Time: “Tempest”

But right now you are dumb. And I love your stupidity, The blind mirror of it. I look in And find no face but my own, and you think that's funny.

Sylvia Plath: “For A Fatherless Son”

Preface

Cobain, Joplin, Morrison; Bartok, Bly; Michelangelo, Bernini; Beethoven, Van Gogh, Gatsby, Woolf; Rachmaninoff; Courbet, Plath; Lear, U2, Jimi, Dylan, Baudelaire, Elvis; Heathcliff: these are the named household gods that haunt and protect Tyler Wettig’s sturdy, allusive, unrhymed sonnets and sonnet-like poems. The sturdiness of the poems is primarily physical: with their wide, chunky lines, they pose like a flexed bicep on the page. The content is another matter: the voice is, by turns, angsty, arty, funny, death-haunted, quasi-religious. Take these lines from “Portrait”:

it’s the 27s that endlessly percolate my neuroses: Cobains, Joplins, and Morrisons of my years, and parents obsessed with being dead. Until then, I’m trudging the fen of another autumn’s drizzle and dread, wonder’s dowry in tow

Or these, from “Reckoning”:

So, for now, let’s explore us: this pantheon of the absurd. With our idols adorned so contrapposto, let’s think Bernini: play the heretics and pray about it tomorrow; our knees won’t make it that far to the ground in church.

As these excerpts suggest, a tone of ambiguous irony dominates, as does the first-person point of view. However, despite the speaker’s interior obsessions, there are people in the poems other than famous writers, artists, and musicians: a lover, dead parents, dead grandparents, a pet or two (at least one dead), and some unnamed friends:

As always, the fool’s in on the joke: don’t tell your life story all at once. At least I think it so. Mom’s going to send your medical records; she can’t find a box big enough. A friend and I talk about why we write: ennui’s antidote, posterity’s beckoning.

(from “Infernal”)

A house, a dog, a couch, two cats: one for each arm, another to hide from me. Lear’s wife, of course, nowhere to be found, but a daughter is here to pillage the old fool . . . (from “Tempest”)

Another noteworthy aspect of Wettig’s poems is the sometimesunusual diction and syntax. For example, in “The Morning After,” “the choir loft will still/its gyres,” and “The tenors and altos,/their breath taken away, will abscond/in muteness.” Or, take this, from “Failed Sonnet for the Unmarried”: “Snug/ the mixer whirs the yolky white: we’re/ tithing god-king ennui.” Finally, there are these startling lines from “Pondering Impressionism”:

Laugh if I say I feel old: id tectonic and tesseracting existential . . . but when my words, world tessellates weary, I retreat in the tropey penance of a love poem: safe verve of wonder, ever-embossed with cliché and hopelessness.

So, the verdict? I love the poems. They remind me of Robert Lowell’s middle and later work, but I detect tinges of Rilke and Baudelaire as well. Wettig mixes his allusions and ambiguities with archaic diction and postmodern (faux?) ennui to build odd, intelligent poems. He is still only in his twenties. It will be fascinating to observe what time will do to him and his work.

Preface taken from “Allusion and Ambiguity: Notes on the Poetry of Tyler Wettig” by Thomas Zimmerman. Tom’s press, Zetataurus, published the author’s first two chapbooks.

The Morning After

I did not wake up like this the weather merely transformed me, and I was too complicit. Maybe I’ll die here, before you, white in the vastness of world and body.

It will rain next week, and I will wake up like this. That morning, like every, I will become disbelief: I know that you will die. That evening, I will know the same.

I will wake up, and the choir loft will still its gyres: in praise of salvation, weapons of mass destruction, their tawdry fires that also sap cancer

mine, in fact. The tenors and altos, their breath taken away, will abscond in muteness. This heavy weather will rouse the brass, the trumpeters:

their anticipation a well-tempered, “surely, it is near.”

On Being (I)

I recovered from those formative and dumb years: now here's to what’s left. My soul that rends and mends all grassroots and punk gives me nary a dull moment, except when I feel dead; but sweet hubris might say it's all in my head. I’ll count the few ways I love myself: sports, poems, and sex. Only two can actually kill me, so I should relax:

I concern myself so much with death that birth means less and less. Remember: dad saw ghosts, my mom’s, and told me he felt blessed. When I meet my other brother, maker, or see

the damned wraiths myself, I’ll own up: I’ve probably relapsed. Or just regressed.

Portrait

A life-lover’s Rubicon, 25th birthday, approaches: that’s about a quarter down, maybe half … but it’s the 27s that endlessly percolate my neuroses: Cobains, Joplins, and Morrisons of my years, and parents obsessed with being dead. Until then, I’m trudging the fen of another autumn’s drizzle and dread, wonder’s dowry in tow: man’s ramshack offices, orifices, and fabric of his angst to hem and sew. Mental moors that wuther inscrutable, seeds to sculpt sonnets or helm madrigals, are here to stay and grow. As for what’s to be, stay, come after? Man should never know.

Creature

Writing: sex-like desire that comes and goes, a manic fetish that ebbs and flows. It’s like music, or maybe marriage. But how would I know? A rejection can soothe, ironically, like Bartok’s Fourth (the screechy one), or Bluebeard’s Castle (the weird one): adjectives to describe people you likely know (or yourself). I’m less a Vitruvian than I am a wannabe love-child of Bly, man-mythos conjugating as much as my syllable-counting mania can take it: not very. The creamy yolk of the sonnet quells hungry wonder, but lust, indelible, tears the man asunder.

Inferno

I’m interred in autumn’s naked dusk, the earth-chapel’s blessed breath complicit in my better angels’ death-rattle. The Zoloft has faded, and my little black dog, wriggling out of his fur to chase shadows, could sniff out my cancer just as well: soul effaced by fatherhood’s fugue creation condemned to being is an etude pianohands, mine, can’t resolve. I’m about-face enough to split out of my own skin, and and in every white-noise baptismal, I give this to all my unborn children: “Go take care of your mother. And what’s at either end of that leash.”

Dollhouse Arson

Another dream about my Grandfather last night: Not the one where he’s here again, frail, wandering through about a ransacked house.

He doesn’t crawl up the stairs like the dream about my dead father. There is no symbol imprinted in his forehead. No shootout in the driveway.

People are thrashing about a hospital room, but I can’t see inside. I’m the gonzo journalist on the fringes of an era’s bitter end.

I wake to a nosebleed: let it drip into a cup so as to defy that death is sweet, but all is static like a train suspended on an overpass.

Reckoning

In a bed big enough for only one, I’m thinking Michelangelo’s David: the perfect man with the perfect body. The ceiling drips Sistine, but maybe that’s just you. Cold pizza’s in the fridge; an unfinished fugue in my head; and you, well, giving head. But we have a city to explore (for a price). So, for now, let’s explore us: this pantheon of the absurd. With our idols adorned so contrapposto, let’s think Bernini: play the heretics and pray about it tomorrow; our knees won’t make it that far to the ground in church.

Babylon Burning

We’re aligned in our pews: we charneltithing doomsayers, deaf-envy progeny of Beethovens, Van Goghs, impressionistic bonheur: vibrations, clefts, dark and light—sight when we were flesh: headfuls of naked-sleep communion— derelict as Gatsby in the pool, Woolf the sea.

Nativity, snowed-over and bone-white: our brood altar.

Pondering Impressionism

Laugh if I say I feel old: id tectonic and tesseracting existential . . . but when my words, world tessellates weary, I retreat in the tropey penance of a love poem: safe verve of wonder, ever-embossed with cliché and hopelessness. My students don't know either yet. Good. So it’s back to the oeuvres of my mad Impressionist heroes, quintessing with proclivity for strange, and me sopping it like ancestral nectar, or just good wine. I've still got a long-lost brother to meet, poetry to teach, lightness to find. For as elusive as that sounds, I'm only lacking the time.

Failed Sonnet for the Unmarried

We’re baking bread, and you want music. So middle Rachmaninoff is blessing the phonograph: I am again alone. Snug

the mixer whirs the yolky white: we’re tithing god-king ennui. Woke ankle numb without a free hand, shoulder un-socketed.

August now: fathers die here. Gallivant turns procession turns pragmatosis: the bypass is coming around 40, so the

epitaph’s complete: “his zest wasn’t in his cooking, but it sure was in his life!”

Drone

My goal is to suffer a little less than I did yesterday, or so to do for a different reason. I solder the misfit ends, adlib from a sexless lacuna, ponder/muse/regret seeds of absurdity the maker (and maker’s maker) planted, try to get it more right every time. But sweet mortality’s got its talon-grip on me, regardless: greying and matted like the first old cat I lost. I promise the first marriage will be the last. Good. But anticipate tragedy like it’s all I know: for those seeds I saw planted, tilled? They’ll grow and grow.

Pondering Romanticism

Foolhardy I plumb the standards, the hard stuff: give thanks to Beethoven's eschewing. Somewhere a conductor has lost his grip, but I know hands that have seen stranger nights.

I’m lonely, in love, and engaged. Sharing a bed has come easy . . . my thoughts: not so much. The mind stays abuzz with repetition, so the poems write themselves. I’m orbiting, lucid and alive, at the crack of dark, animus in tooth and claw to spear my side. No, I’m not in love with my mother; but lust, infernal muse, is burning in her myth.

Postmodern Epigram

Dear reader: be steadfast in your bitter, but don’t be Courbet: paint the damn angel.

Exodus

I’m stuck between my two selves: my duality, borderline … but now, misophone: the ride is treble-rich and hot, but I know what to do: rip it off like a bandage and lick it like a wound. Placate by Googling “tragic heroes who live” as Bono’s in my ear singing Jimi singing Dylan: I can’t get no relief . . .

Now, I’m left to my weird idols: Baudelaire who said to stay drunk, Elvis who was only strung out on music. Paradox I’m content with. Closer

now, so time to leave something behind, I’m told. Now, immortal tragedian.

The Coma Tapes

black candle darks a vanitas of lily-wreath and cadaver-dog:

peels and hungers at happy’s pareidolia, scabbed amygdala

apostates screaming vermillion at the old shroud, bulwark-romantics

shading under a furrowed boston fern: unborn, the man is complete

Infernal

The body and blood of a life’s work: it brings as much joy as mockery, healing as pain. As always, the fool’s in on the joke: don’t tell your life story all at once. At least I think it so. Mom’s going to send your medical records; she can’t find a box big enough. A friend and I talk about why we write: ennui’s antidote, posterity’s beckoning. A habit harmless enough, it seems, but blissful selfawareness is death, resurrection, and confession; we do it slant. Tradition is built from necessity that hungers for a breath. Our ends? Maybe more than death.

Man on Fire (III)

Two billboards on the interstate say I’ll meet god when I die, and Plath’s telling me there’s no way out of the mind. But I’m home now attacking the Prozac. Then the Moscato.

Sage is burning in front of me, a black metal record hisses, agita’s monochrome. I drink, see spirits: buried, exhumed, forgotten, remembered.

I forgot about the electrodes still stuck to my chest, that spot on the brain, and the marriage in remission.

So that fear of dying alone? More than superstition.

Tempest

A house, a dog, a couch, two cats: one for each arm, another to hide from me. Lear’s wife, of course, nowhere to be found, but a daughter is here to pillage the old fool: his half-eaten memoir, nibbled on between brandy bites, is the wedding cabernet gathering dust on the fridge. Now dad-rock U2 is on the Walkman: sleep comes like a drug … but I wake up and hit the bottle: vengeful ales to still the tedium, and a lost cousin, muse, otherwise drinking a song called desertion: tremolo picked, meet and right. The man, all contradictions. The king, Woman.

On Being (II)

Much to be thankful for, but a little more to dread: my life, my death, miasma that shrouds, belies every becoming breath. Optimism can cloudburst me like the prick of a needle, or that dream where I was never actually born.

Years of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear has taught me a life of fortune is a life forlorn. Attrition makes me righteous with envy, my siren bemoaning my croaks and caws;

but age and reason, nebulous, are my edge’s nibs and gnaws. The animals in the house are asleep, and it’s not my mom

that’s dying. If I say I’m not happy, I’m probably lying.

Spectral

Dear reader, are you still with me? I’m moving on: my debts, ironic and/or fleshy, are paid in sobriety, and the pregnant canon of Grandpa’s ghostwisdom stillborn in my dreams: accept the absurd; it’s all we have. But I’m never sure if I’m alive or dead: frail of poet-lover-devil ethos, like grave-digging Heathcliff’s muse, and spectral like life’s incredulous placenta. So here’s to a fool’s posterity; likewise, this never really happened, and, love of my life, I was never there.

“Tyler Wettig’s new collection of sonnets is moody, gripping, and highly accomplished . . . like a millennial Shakespeare might have written. The conversational voice, keen insight, and humor that a reader admires in Wettig’s earlier works all remain, but in this new set, the words have been tucked into a darker velvet. ”

Meg Dobbins, Victorian Literature Scholar and Ph.D.