My Poor Fool

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”

—King Lear

 

Heaven was just the place for him to go.

He never understood this world. You know,

We would discuss it over marmalade—

Those violent forces—how the world was made.

He would take soldiers—strips of buttered toast—

And dip them in his egg, completely lost.

Most considered him a child—a half-wit.

Like any parent, my poor heart was split.

 

His gags were creaky as an outhouse door,

And yet I loved him—loved him to the core.

He turned the girls to jelly. In his eye,

There twinkled something wild in black tie

Which frightened my officials, children, and dogs.

He painted funny faces in the fogs

Which rolled in like thunder from the sea

Those nights we kept each other company.

 

He tested my love constantly. He’d twist

My heart right into knots—without a sweat—

One drop of effort. For some reason I

Don’t fully comprehend, he teased me, “Why

Are you so melancholy, Lord—so blue?”

He pinged me with a pebble from his shoe,

His face a mask of innocence. Of course,

I think he knew he would wind up a corpse.

 

I hanged the lad in public to remind

The peoples of the Earth that God had died.

They stared at him like vegetables. The few

Who cried for Mercy I hanged twice. Like you,

I wished his last remarks had shown more flair,

A little bravery. Jerked in the air,

He gargled, “Jesus,” and choked. His final joke,

One word, dissovling in the sky, like smoke.

 

An Anthem For Orpheus

Some animals were gathered in a ring
around a rhapsode playing with a song.
He sighed and plucked a solitary string,
“It’s music. What could possibly go wrong?”

The lion lying there, beside the lamb,
drifted off to sleep in the tall grass;
brooks trickled in, and so did boulders, and
the audience stood up, as if at Mass.

He handled his equipment with such skill,
he held a brief monopoly on sound.
He plucked another string, another—til
a mushroom cloud erupted over town.

Some say this was the first experiment
to mix religion, politics and art.
The town was made of music, not cement.
Construction in cement had yet to start.

John Milton Interviews Satan For Entertainment Tonight

[Transcript from an interview soon to be broadcast on Entertainment Tonight.]

Milton: Since Halloween falls on a Monday this year, and this is his birthday weekend, I am here talking with Satan, on Skype, from his holiday villa “Pandaemonium” deep in the depths of Hell. Satan, let me be the first fan in England to wish you a big Happy Birthday!

Satan: Gee-wiz, thanks, John. So kind of you to call. I am touched, really, I am. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you. And may I say you look marvelous for a 400-year-old? What is your secret? Who is your surgeon? You could pass for a teenager. It must be the poetry—Paradise Regained.

Milton: [Blushing.] Such a sweetheart.

Satan: By the way, I enjoyed your pamphlet on free speech. Areopagitica—great title. I can’t wait for the movie.

Milton: [Even redder now.] No wonder Eve fell for you. Satan, I know you are in Hell and everything, but you sound so mellow, so relaxed. Why is that?

Satan: I am not religious, you see. I love where I am in life. I always have. This is my home. Hell is all in the mind. So is Heaven. As long I have high speed internet access, a hibachi, a Ken doll to grill and somewhere to surf, I am in Heaven. Malibu Barbie never had it so good.

Milton: When you say you are not religious, what do you mean? Are you saying that you don’t believe in God?

Satan: No, not exactly. I believe in God. I just wish that he believed in me.

Milton: I heard about your break-up. I didn’t want to ask about it directly. Worse than Jen and Brad’s?

Satan: I wouldn’t say it was as Earth-shattering as that, not by Hollywood standards. But it was certainly all over the tabloids at the time. It was bad enough.

Milton: Are you bitter?

Satan: No, not bitter. Just a little sad. Look, don’t get me wrong. I think God is great. “Akbar” and all that. I wish I could do more to help him—justify his actions, so to speak. Nobody adores God more than I do—even after what he did to the Amalekites in that bar in Seattle. I understand lashing out. I have felt that way about the paparazzi myself. But genocide? Jeez Louise, God, get a grip.

Milton: Are you still friends?

Satan: In the biblical sense, sure. It can get complicated around the holidays. God and I still get together for brunch whenever I am in town.

Milton: I always suspected God was gay.

Satan: He’s not. Not exclusively. I believe God is bisexual. He loves almost everyone. Even the Amalekites, maybe. I am not so sure how he feels about the paparazzi though. He has a hard time with photographers. I wish they would leave him alone.

Milton: [Nodding sympathetically.]

Satan: [Leaning forward, confidentially.] Off the record, John, between you and me, he has this kid and some mysterious woman in Rome he is paying alimony to. Or blackmail. Possibly a transsexual. You know how those Italians are. I never saw the name on the envelope, but he used to cut her a check—10% of his residuals—every month. He is a nice man, a lovely man, but an unholy financial mess.

Milton: Off the record. Sure. [Clearing his throat.] So, when you say you are not religious, you don’t mean to suggest you are an atheist?

Satan: No. Far from it. There is no system of belief more suicidal to happiness than atheism. A pile of dust—what kind of future is that for an ambitious angel to look forward to?

Milton: Not much of one, I suppose.

Satan: Hell, no. Give me Malibu and my hibachi.

Milton: About religion then.

Satan: Oh, yeah. I mean, I hate organized religions. I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state. I don’t believe in unions—reunions—collectives of any kind—artistic, intellectual, political. Sex is a different matter. I am all for that—consenting individuals. But I would rather stick my head in a wood chipper than be caught in a cheering crowd. I am a small ‘d’ democrat. The ‘d’ stands for ‘devil’.

Milton: [Smiling.] Very funny. Speaking of crowds, what do you think of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Satan: I honestly feel sorry for the kids. Lied to everywhere, by everyone. No place to poop. But I think their leaders are idiots—they should be pissing on their professors’ lawns instead of in Zuccotti Park—especially the English majors. Who spends $100,000 at a spa studying Foucault for 4 years? Insane.

Milton: It is rather.

Satan: You can buy houses all over America for that much and still have money left over to open a coffee shop, learn HVAC repair, and stage a guerilla theater production of Coriolanus in Washington D.C.—complete with puppets. [Sipping herbal tea.] It’s like I said about Heaven and Hell: you make your own Malibu. There are always dues to pay to some bare-knuckled thug or wild-eyed zany somewhere down the line, if you don’t.

Milton: Can you give us an example?

Satan: [Thinking.] I was going to mention Bush and Obama, but they are more like Laurel and Hardy, aren’t they? The two smiling sides of a counterfeit coin. Nobody takes Republicans and Democrats seriously anymore—not in the real world—not in the world I live in, anyway.

Milton: In Hell?

Satan: In California, John. Ken—wave to the man. I know he can’t see you, I know he is blind, I know he’s a poet, but be a doll, Ken, and wave to Milton anyway. [Ripping off Ken’s left arm and still trying to think of a good example of a thug or a zany.] Ken is waving to you, John.

Milton: Hi, Ken!

Satan: [Using Ken’s severed arm to scratch his back.] See, take the French Revolution. Take the intellectuals. Take the guillotine. They get rid of Schwarzenegger and what is the first thing the smart people do? They anoint Jerry Brown Governor: they install a moonbeam as god and immediately lose their minds. Jesus, you might as well hand over your house keys to the chief lunatic in the asylum. [Rolling his yellow eyes in disbelief.]

Milton: Speaking of Jesus, I have always wondered, do you know him—Jesus—I mean—personally?

Satan: I do. [Tossing Ken’s arm into a river of lava.] He will always have a special place in my heart. A nice boy. Red hair. Constantly climbing trees. A dead ringer for Opie Taylor—the young Ron Howard. Jesus was always being followed home by lost puppies—wherever he went. I think the divorce hit him hard and the puppies sensed that.

Milton: The divorce? Oh, the lady [?] in Rome.

Satan: Yeah. Her. Animals are like that. They know things. They remember things. The other kids are really going to crucify him in high school, of course, if he doesn’t lose those strays. I have half a mind to tell him the puppies can stay down here in Malibu with Ken and me.

Milton: That’s awfully generous.

Satan: It’s nothing. Jesus texts me all the time. God is hopeless with numbers, so I help Jesus with his math homework. He is learning fractions now. He thinks of me as his second father, I guess, Pandaemonium as his second home. God used to bring him down to Malibu from L.A., you know, for long weekends. We made quite a happy family, really. The three of us would play Monopoly together. [Wistfully, as if remembering happier days.] Jesus liked to be the thimble. Being the bank, I preferred the top hat.

Milton: And what was God?

Satan: God? Oh, God. What was God? Let me see if I can remember. Christ was the thimble. I was the hat. [Long pause.] I’ve got it: God was the dog. He was the dog. Of course, what else could God be?

Milton: The dog. Of course.

Together: Happy Halloween!

Animal Sanctuary

For Gavin

I’m sure your rabbits will be happy there.
Yours sounds much friendlier than mine—
That asylum I was once placed in—
Church: a clean, cadaverous Baptist
Interior, supported by dark ribs,
A space capable of accommodating
A thousand souls according to the fire
Code restrictions. It was Hell. Our
Choir sang hymns in satin pajamas, blue,
Piano on the left, organ on the right,
A madman in the middle. I would poke
Holes in his upholstery with a pencil
I kept sharp for that specific purpose.
I longed for an Apocalypse—a really
Loud fart—a nuclear catastrophe—
A final trumpet—to put an end to the
Announcements—meetings, births, deaths—
Epistles to the Galatians, Colossians,
Galoshes, Dalmatians, and the wrinkly
Sound of hands, in unison, just
Flipping pages. It went on forever.
The Lord’s Supper proved such a meager
Meal, hardly even a snack, really—
Matzo fragments and a thimble of Welch’s
Grape juice—which I was forbidden. (I
Was not baptized.) I wanted to get
Out, go to McDonald’s, anywhere,
For lunch. I poked the pew impatiently,
I drew a zillion pairs of Golden Arches—
MMMMMM—in the back of my Bible—
Filling up the white end pages—those
God left blank after Revelations. I
Loved the hymns. I loathed the sermons. They
Ended with Amens at one, with my
Stomach angrily growling. That’s why
I am so glad you’re adding your own
Ecclesiastical flair to that Maui
Sanctuary. I bet communion in
Any safe haven you would devise
Would keep demented parsons out, but still
Admit a few strange boys in bunny suits—
Those looking to gnaw on a raw carrot,
Or thirsty for some unusual tipple,
You would smile and generously provide.

Certain Names

We cling to them for luck, certain names,
We mutter to the air, iron and clay,
We hope they will protect our homes from flames
Consuming other houses. Every day

We sacrifice good books to them, like goats,
We sentence little doubts to copper mines,
We shake our tambourines, we dance—slit throats—
We lay our minds, like corpses, at their shrines.

Even the iconoclast. The last
Man you might expect to form a cult,
Can flood the streets with fools ready to blast
Themselves to bits in temples. The result:

More misery, more blood, more martyrs, more
Temples raised to him. This is war.

Ex Nihilo

I wrote this about 8 years ago and I have never been able to find a place to put it. It is written in the rhyme scheme of ottava rima (abababcc, for you poetry junkies), and I always hoped that I would be able to integrate it into a larger poem.  But it seems to stand rather shakily on its own.

So, I publish it here, out of context, in the the hope that it will find a place on the Internet, if not in your heart or in your memory.


New York: A Fragment


Nothing in this City lasts; nothing is

       This dust, impossible to dust away—

Pollen, maybe, pulverized asbestos—
       The gulf between today and yesterday.
But nothing’s more insidious than this—
       This feeling of despair—what can I say?
Yet out of nothing, next to nothing—silt—
You and I, our Universe is built.

Marbles

The last few posts have finally been assembled into a finished “story” which has a working title of “A Private Symposium.”

“A Private Symposium” is the first complete short story I have written, apart from a quiet impressionistic piece (modeled on La Mer, by Claude Debussy) about a mad scientist’s attempt to resurrect a giant red squid using lightning bolts. This earned me an “A” from the boys in Mrs. Sugar’s 6th grade class, but a “D” in grammar from the Teacher herself, for mis-punctuating the phrase, “We’re fucked,” as, “Were fucked,” leading to some raised eyebrows among the School Board about the placement of one tentacle in relation to the mad scientist’s sexy, scantily clad assistant, Bubbles. This orthographical contretemps would not have been a problem in Japan.

The only other foray I have made into the world of fiction was a piece I slaved over for 2 years in the mid-90s. As I envisioned the work at the time, when I was 26, this story would be the first in a series of Jamesian character studies, centered on the adventures of one Professor Mooney. In the opening tale, Professor Mooney returns triumphant from a contentious conference in Boulder, Colorado, where he delivered a provocative paper on the position of commas in the sex life of Gibbons (descendants of the famous English historian of Rome, not the apes) at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Conference, only to find his white boxer, Marbles, dreaming of beef marrow bones in an inaccessible crotch of the elm tree in his front yard.

Most of the story we spend with the perplexed professor, orbiting the tree, trying to figure out how the dog came to be there. Professor Mooney advances several different theories which, to his nimble mind, seem equally credible: extraterrestrials, an earthquake, a mountain lion, Dick Cheney, ghosts, a tri-cobalt satellite (left over from an episode of Star Trek), the black magic of his gardener (Barney Haller), a cantankerous kite string, or a confabulation of faeries.

Being a professor of Comparative Literatures [sic], the most obvious solution to the problem of the dog, of course, never occurs to him: a deliberate prank perpetrated by the boisterous and be-freckled neighborhood Boy Scout, Tommy (boys bearing the name Thomas, as Dr. S.L. Clemens so clearly demonstrated in his seminal early work on adolescent male psychology, being the central source of mischief in the known Universe. And several dimensions yet to be discovered.)

For five pages we wander in circles with Professor Mooney under this tedious tree, looking up at his boxer, trying figure out just what has gone wrong with the forces of Nature in his secluded corner of Cambridge. It never occurs him to call the fire department, or grab the aluminum ladder the painters left under his lilacs and try to rescue his dog himself, so lost he becomes in a maze of thorny epistemological questions arising from the presence of a dog in such a tall tree: since, as you will notice, the word “Dog” spelled backwards is “God.” And we all know in what mysterious ways that gentleman works.

Sadly, I never got further with this story than the thin filament of drool connecting Marbles above to the Earth below before I abandoned it as totally unworkable. Comforting as the image of a ficticious dog sleeping in a ficticious tree might seem to me, I couldn’t imagine anyone else would believe it, except for the people of PETA, who would have burned down my house.

Good Friday, 2009, A Day of Fermentation

FROM harmony, from heavenly harmony, 

This universal frame began: 

When nature underneath a heap 

Of jarring atoms lay, 

And could not heave her head, 

The tuneful voice was heard from high, 

'Arise, ye more than dead!' 

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 

In order to their stations leap, 

And Music's power obey. 

From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 

This universal frame began: 

From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 

The diapason closing full in Man.

John Dryden, 1687