Poem-A-Day #180 : Modern

Modern

In the bent metal siding your reflection is a mass of muted shades hard to label as you
though there is want to see you in the not you

Broken water is what all of this feels like
stone tossed into the lake then gone forever and then all you want is the stone that is gone

This is not a breakup poem these are words about the self about the missing thing
the thing that never was anyway but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


This is the curse of the bent metal reflected word the blobs of color across its surface are static
there is no nostalgia nostalgia is for nostalgia

I want to say you are beautiful but how do we say that
@--'--,-- I suppose or I like your colors reflected in this space tell me what they look like for real

Poem-A-Day #176 : Unfinished Thought On Malaise

Unfinished Thought On Malaise

                         and when I said that I just wanted to throw things to the flood
               and you broke into screaming fits and the skin on your forehead heated itself
     and your eyes reddened into sand

Sometimes we are bad people look I make choices look at all these choices I'm lousy with choices they cover the room in an installation of choices they impede progress and attempt to become life itself life of choices choices burning out themselves to become a star of imploding choices nuclear choices that will melt flesh

I don't expect you to understand with your ontology the way it is

-

     The impulse to undo everything is so strong

                    - put paint back in tubes - thread un-sweater - butterfly the goo-filled cocoon -

          Do not mistake this for destruction
though I understand that feeling this is more about what happens to things when they are un-ed

Do we forget them

When the city - which does not retreat it is not alive in that way - when the city cracks like a beetle under foot like exoskeletons in diatomaceous earth like the earth after rain -

                                        Do we forget that easily
if we want to I suppose we do - and when the thing falls and breaks on the pavement
we must either mourn or get the glue

-

Rust

Life lends itself to malaise

A sort of tentacled feeling
          suckers and all

     and all the things that might come with them
               the stinging ticks of a swarm of baby jellly fish wrapping on your legs
                         when I said it I meant it and I even intended to do it

Poem-A-Day #49 : A B C Do Everything Different Than You Are

A B C Do Everything Different Than You Are

Anger rises up in the gut it
begins in the pit - green and
churning

During this - nothing will make sense
everyone in the vicinity will
fall at the stench of it

Grandiose much ?
Hell and primroses are more fearsome
inch worms are more dangerous

Just shut up about your ennui - it's boring
King ego was never that interesting - the
lining of an old suitcase is more interesting

More of those poems about trees - people liked those
no one cares about Nikola Tesla
or his dead brother or your obsession with them

Perhaps the gay stuff could get published - the
queers are so in
right now anyway - at least - until they aren't

So many words -
they pile
until they topple over - until nothing holds - not
very long anyway

What is the weather like - what is the time - your
X marking your place in the world - this is what they want

Yielding to our histories only begets histories - a
Z where we all fall asleep to the sound of your buzzing

Poem-A-Day #26 : Sous le Feu de la Guerre

Sous le Feu de la Guerre

The sun was in my eyes - that is the first thing

The song on the radio was about war - but not this current one

I was thinking about an essay on sudden horrific intrusion and about how easy it would be to just drive the car into oncoming traffic - that moment when you're standing on a balcony and want to jump

Sunsets do that weird lens flare thing like sci fi movies - I've never seen a green flash but I know it's out there

What about driving a car into the Grand Canyon

There's mountains within mountains somewhere - they might even be ancient - you would be forgiven if you begin to suspect that one climbs Everest to try to die

There's a second thing you should know -

White Noise

Middle-aged white men are not the only ones who feel sad.

Let that sink in for a second.

Now think about the books we hold up as 'best' and 'classics'. I don't want to rail against dead white men. I'm not about to attempt a dismantling of an ivory tower. But the majority of books are about middle-aged white men who have ennui.

I've been reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. It is the second book of his that I have tried to read. I picked through 20 pages of Underworld in 2005 and put it down with it leaving no real impression. I came to White Noise with few expectations. It was a book on my shelf that was unread.

DeLillo reminds me of Philip Roth. They both trade in a sort of suburban distopia full of bored men and women that is meant to equate to depth of story. The main difference is that I don't find DeLillo as preachy and in some ways he even seems aware of the absolute obnoxiousness of his characters.

White Noise centers around the fear of death. There is even a pill presented that is meant to defeat this fear. Is this the only remaining fear middle-class America has? That is takes 300 pages to explore the idea and manages to say little on it is telling.

The book is full of beauty. I don't want it to be thought that DeLillo is a bad writer. He and Roth have moments of sheer brilliance. DeLillo manages to come up with insane non sequiturs that hang together like a beaded curtain and make the plot of his novel. That the majority of the actions in the novel are designed to keep the characters in stasis belies the use of plot as a description.

A group of professors talking at lunch about where they were when famous deaths occurred. A speech about how both Elvis and Hitler were mama's boys. A young child riding a tricycle across four lanes of traffic while elderly women watch in horror. The noxious cloud of black that chases out protagonist to the point of driving his family in their station wagon off-road and across a stream at full speed.

That you cannot glean a plot from any of those moments is my point exactly.

These are vignettes masquerading as novel. They are partially related moments that feel like an author coming up with 'cool' things that should go into a book. Then they are hung onto a message of melancholia and death in the mid-west, in a man-made environmental disaster, in popping pills and cheating on spouses.

This is the problem with these books about middle-aged white ennui. They are loose arrangements of things that sort of make up a story. We hold them up and call them great because they reflect us so clearly yet do little more.

Ulysses, Portnoy's Complaint, White Noise, In Search Of Lost Time, Love in the Time of Cholera, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby. I would argue that all are about wealthy or well-off white ennui. Even Marquez, who manages to fall headlong into this trap. Just read Memories of My Melancholy Whores for proof.

It's all over other film as well. Look at A Single Man or A Serious Man...both men are the same really. A Serious Man, a Coen Brothers film, is at its heart an adaptation of White Noise. They are both about the mid-west. About college professors. About unhappy marriages and nostalgia for the past. Both seep in unfocused sadness while giving their characters undefined terminal health problems. Both have a disaster at their core. One in the middle, and one at the end.

Neither manages to clarify anything. Both have moments of brilliance bracketed by yawning expanses of 'why am I paying attention to these sad terrible people'.