A Letter to Emily Gould

What a briny prickle you’ve created of yourself!
It’s a sorry tale I’ve read from you, your life upon a shelf
Of public scrutiny. Where will you go from here?

Might you remember Rostov’s charging the French Army,
His sudden realization that I mean no harm,
My friends love me;
My family would be sorely grieved
I am a really nice person;
So why are they shooting blazing guns at me?
My God I’m like to die!
Retreat! Retreat!
And yet they called him a hero, fool that he was,
And he was never quite the same,
A wiser man, and somewhat more sedate.

It’s time to quit Emily.
Quit being Emily.
Perhaps you think I’ve not been you
And should say nothing.
Yes, I should say nothing.
I’ve said nothing to you
Because you don’t exist, Emily,
You’ve lost it.
You wanted fearless adventure,
Free love and
Faceless friendship;
Virtual reality and no real virtue.
They’re oxymora, Emily.
Like you they don’t exist.

Go away now,
Retreat to no place
Where no one sees
And no one cares.
It’s a nice place actually,
Restful to a point,
Healing.
Give it up Emily.
Quit trying,
Quit trying not to try,
Quit quitting.
hush

Now just breathe
for a while.
breathe.

Notice if you will
The emptiness within
A chest of emptiness.
A space, a place
Where nothing is
Within your chest
Beneath, behind
Unnoticed breasts
Close by an anxious heart,
That fills with nothing
More than life
And just as quickly
Empties of itself.
It’s yours, it’s you,
That space where nothing is.
Do not notice now
The fullness of all living things,
Their panting, gasping, respirating
Breath;
The flow of waters over gills
The leaves of porous trees
The crawling worms
And creeping bugs
And microscopic things
Within this microscopic sphere
Of life on earth.
Do not notice your
Communion with silent earthlings
In an envelope of air.
but hush
you don’t exist
you are not here.
When you arrive
You’re welcome.

Father's Day

Let me sing about myself, or rather
Let me tell you something of my father.
He was a good man, first of all, the best
In numberless ways, from Portland, the west
End of Louisville. A worker by day,
And husband/father by night, my stay-
At-home mother’s best friend; and disciplined
To work and duty, faithful to church, deepened
By hard military experience,
A Marine, not given to prurience
But not without humor either. Unschooled
Like men of his time, wise and rarely fooled
By salesmen or shop girls. I will not disclose
His shortcomings. Allow me to keep them close
To my own heart for once, and not to speak
Of his secrets. What were the highest, the peak
Moments of his brief life? Perhaps my mother
Knew them. She admired the man, her other
Half, as they used to say. When he died at
Fifty-five, my life abruptly stopped. I sat
In a psychiatric hospital for
Six weeks, or paced its hard terrazzo floor,
Wondering how I got there and where should
I go from there. My greatest fear – he could
See me now, wherever I turned. Whatever
I did he oversaw. I could not sever
His spirit from me; it was many a year
Before I knew there was nothing to fear
From his knowing or his omnipresence;
Nor should I have been awed by his radiance.
My burden was to live with his good name,
To honor his memory, and hide the shame
That clogged my thinking. I often recall
Hamlet, "He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.”

Half a lifetime later, I miss the man.
He is still my hero, judge and standard
Although I am today less enamored
By his Greatest Generation code.
If my biography were named an ode
To my father’s decency, then I should
Think my life well-lived. He fathered a good
Man – myself – and nine others. Now let him
Rest and add his voice to angelic hymns.

I set out some time ago to tell
You of myself, but soon distracted, fell
Into an abyss of reminiscence
On my father, an icon, a god since
My earliest life. That’s enough for now;
I’ve said already more than he’d allow.

Alien Encounter

You greet my deities with disgust
My gods and fears are strange to you
They cannot charm or be discussed

If I’ve found ways to tame my lust
And loathsome habits now eschew
You greet my deities with disgust

My gods have ways you call unjust
Their famous mercies all too few
They cannot charm or be discussed

Before your votive lights a bust
Siddhartha, Christ, or Lao Tzu
They greet my deities with disgust

Their ears are stone, their eyes have dust
Their aging skin a sickening hew
They cannot charm or be discussed

Between us grows a hardened crust
There’s nothing fresh and nothing new
You greet my deities with disgust
They cannot charm or be discussed.

Horror and Humor

Horror and Humor
In the world of entertainment
Are sisters.
It’s all they can do,
The implausible monsters,
To keep a straight face.
Damsels in distress
Screaming their tonsils out,
Laugh hysterically between shots.

Elsewhere Horror and Humor
Never speak to one another;
They live on separate planets.
There’s really nothing funny
About hunger, rape, or ravaging armies.

Sexuality often joins her sister Humor,
They live and work together,
Share picnics and family fun,
Office parties and vacations;
But they never pray.
Nor do they meet in church
With Sister Faith.
She goes alone.
Men and women may laugh
With delight at their nakedness,
Its touch and sight and smell,
But there’s no kiss and tell in church.
If Adam finds no suitable partner
In his menagerie
his straight man –
God –
Doesn’t laugh knowingly.
Nor does the congregation.

But Sex and Horror tryst
And not only in slasher films.
Children defiled try to sort out
The sordid, tangled strands
Of love, anger, hate, affection, loathing, fear.
Adults too renounce affection
When they find it in bed
With Force
Coiled like a snake around its waist.
We wait for peace to no avail;
For a time of healing, but terror comes instead.

Speaking of which:
I notice Faith is often unwelcome.
Mine is pretty silly --
All that praising and thanking --
And the groveling.
I wish I didn’t grovel.
It lacks dignity.

Thanks for bearing with my religion;
I’ll try not to pray too long.
I know it’s tiresome.
It’s just the attempt
To speak the unspeakable
Explain the inexplicable
Unscrew the inscrutable
Unleashes a barrage
Of words and they keep coming.
“INCOMING!”
Perhaps it’s more like a deluge.
“MAN THE BILGE PUMPS!
HERE IT COMES AGAIN!”
Sometimes ideas flow too,
Incoherently.
I see connections everywhere.

The crucifixion, for instance,
Horror or humor?
Wasn’t his rout of the demons pretty damned funny?
Didn’t you laugh at their bare
Butts disappearing in the distance?
Weren’t you glad at your relief?
You find no humor at all
When you recall your fears and doubt?

How many times did he tell you
Be not afraid?
But you feared and now
You realize how groundless
Were your fears.
God was always in charge,
If only you had believed.

But it was horrible too.

A man’s dying on the cross –
What is beautiful about that?
How can you say,
“What a beautiful crucifix over the altar?”
It’s horrible.
But not half so grisly as
The man’s body stretched
By uplifting nails
And the downward dead-weight
Yank of gravity;
His flayed flesh;
Yellow, brown, red filth
Streaming from every orifice,
Shoulders, elbows, arms unjointed,
Head upside-down
Hanging helpless heavy.
The stench alone was unbearable.
The crowds jeered, of course.
What else could they do?
The sight of his bestial nature
Stripped them of human decency.

There is no comedy there.
Is it decent to remember
Or imagine
Or describe?
Is it better left unsaid?
If you dare you will find
Even sexual abuse in this
Passion Narrative –
His nakedness, the taunts and jeers,
The leering eyes of strangers,
And his helplessness.
What did they feel in their loins,
What stimulant,
As they stripped, tortured, nailed
And raised him up?

But we will laugh on Sunday
Tears streaming from our eyes
As we hear the good news.
Free at last, free at last,
Thank God Almighty I am free at last.

There is healing in his wings
Even for children.
Love and truth will meet;
Justice and peace will kiss.
The wolf shall be guest of the lamb,
And the leopard lie down with the kid;
Horror and Humor will sport together
As Faith and Sex slap hands. 

Riff on a Nightmare

...O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low….
from Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley

 
fleeing an army
in hiding eating uncooked 
fish their defleshed bones.

in a muddy ditch
enemies pass over head
fish their unfleshed bones

eating fish their bones
unfleshed in muddy ditches
skeleton uncooked

armies of night fear
now dread passing overhead
their bones unfleshed fish

overheard armies
fish for me and unfleshed bones
in a muddy ditch

fish hover overhead 
armies forage passed ditches
cartoon skeletons

 
fish eyes stare exes
inked in cartoon skeletons 
as armies forage

bony skeletons
ditches of dead eyed fishes 
foraging armies

armies search the night
in muddy ditches hiding
eating fish-eyed bones

armies search and find
in a child’s cartooned nightmares 
his skeletoned bones 

armies overheard
forage for eyeless fishes
in dreamscape ditches

fish bone pattern leaves
displayed in windblown ditches 
splay like skeletons 

The Lord Ascends

The Lord ascends to shouts of joy,
A blare of trumpets for the child
Whose coming the powers-that-be annoys;
He’s far too pleasant, far too mild

And trumpets blaring for the child
Will shatter windows, tumble walls
As pleasant springtime airs and mild
Invade our cubicles and stalls

Reopen shuttered airless halls
To free our mind and open eyes
The silly cubicles and stalls
That tried so hard to hide our lies,

To keep our minds and blind our eyes
Evaporate before the boy
Who tries the harshest, hidden lies
And dumps them like discarded toys.

Elaborate before the boy
The nation's proud display their deeds;
He dumps them like discarded toys
He turns instead to find the seeds

The nations' proud despised as weeds
His father planted years ago
He means to find and tend the needs
Of all who suffer lives of woe.

His father planted years ago
A garden rich with all delight
And those who suffer lives of woe
Will never need to take to flight

From gardens rich with all delight.
The powers-that-were no more annoy
And humble folks need not take flight
As God descends to shouts of joy.