waylaid

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky -

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap -
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a
living?

Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son -
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food -
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for you lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's al yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going
on -

Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers!
Chocolates!

All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bell boy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
Running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara Falls forever! In a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce -

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr. Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs. Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust -

Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I an sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind
me,

finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin
soup -

O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Back records
Tack Della Francesca al over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for it's playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking -
No! I should not get married I should never get married!
But - imagine If I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on
clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream -

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes -
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and -
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible -
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait - bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life


Gregory Corso

When First We Faced, And Touching Showed

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?




To My Wife

Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan
The future was, in which temptingly spread
All that elaborative nature can.
Matchless potential! but unlimited
Only so long as I elected nothing;
Simply to choose stopped all ways up but one,
And sent the tease-birds from the bushes flapping.
No future now. I and you now, alone.

So for your face I have exchanged all faces,
For your few properties bargained the brisk
Baggage, the mask-and-magic-man's regalia.
Now you become my boredom and my failure,
Another way of suffering, a risk,
A heavier-than-air hypostasis.

I've deleted this poem, because of this: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2223779,00.html 

The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

D. H. Lawrence

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth,
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

I wish I'd been that much more willin'
When I had more tooth there than fillin'
To pass up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin'.

When I think of the lollies I licked,
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All that hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My Mother, she told me no end,
"If you got a tooth, you got a friend"
I was young then, and careless,
My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.

Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right,
I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin'
And pokin' and fussin'
Didn't seem worth the time... I could bite!

If I'd known I was paving the way,
To cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fiIlin's
Injections and drillin's
I'd have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine,
In these molars of mine,
"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

How I laughed at my Mother's false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath,
But now comes the reckonin'
It's me they are beckonin'
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.


Pam Ayres

but excerts from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, on the eve of the publication of his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, a beginners' guide to poetry writing. The article is by Catherine Shoard.



Fry: "The strength and confidence that we associate with the Victorians we also associate with things like empire, poverty, social injustice, sexual hypocrisy. We can't seem to separate them. So if you're white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of Western enlightenment then it sounds as if you're basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the Third World."

But political correctness shouldn't take all the blame. Far from it - the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.

"You cannot work too hard at poetry," he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. "People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted."

He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.

"It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.' Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …"

Morally lazy?

"All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don't stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it's not good enough."

The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. "At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That's why it's so grown up. It's the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything - that's so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it."'

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.


Ezra Pound

Long live our friend the revolver !

Long live our friend the machine-gun!

--Israeli terrorist chant


One April morning in the sixth grade, we became, first by

accident and then by premeditation, trout fishing in America

terrorists.

It came about this way: we were a strange bunch of kids.

We were always being called in before the principal for

daring and mischievous deeds. The principal was a young

man and a genius in the way he handled us.

One April morning we were standing around in the play

yard, acting as if it were a huge open-air poolhall with the

first-graders coming and going like poolballs. We were all

bored with the prospect of another day's school, studying

Cuba.

One of us had a piece of white chalk and as a first-grader

went walking by, the one of us absentmindedly wrote "Trout

fishing in America" on the back of the first-grader.

The first-grader strained around, trying to read what was

written on his back, but he couldn't see what it was, so he

shrugged his shoulders and went off to play on the swings.

We watched the first-grader walk away with "Trout fishing

in America" written on his back. It looked good and

seemed quite natural and pleasing to the eye that a first-

grader should have "Trout fishing in America" written in

chalk on his back.

The next time I saw a first-grader, I borrowed my friend's

piece of chalk and said, "First-grader, you're wanted over

here."

The first-grader came over to me and I said, "Turn

around."

The first-grader turned around and I wrote "Trout fishing

in America" on his back. It looked even better on the second

first-grader. We couldn't help but admire it. "Trout fishing

in America." It certianly did add something to the first-

graders. It compleated them and gave them a kind of class

"It really looks good, doesn't it?"

"Yeah."

"There are a lot more first-graders over there by the monkey-bars."

"Yeah. "

"Lets get some more chalk."

"Sure."

We all got hold of chalk and later in the day, by the end of

lunch period, almost all of the first-graders had "Trout fishing

in America" written on their backs, girls included.

Complaints began arriving at the principal's office from

the first-grade teachers. One of the complaints was in the

form of a little girl.

"Miss Robins sent me, " she said to the principal. "She

told me to have you look at this."

"Look at what?" the principal said, staring at the empty

child.

"At my back, " she said.

The little girl turned around and the principal read aloud,

"Trout fishing in America."

"Who did this?" the principal said.

That gang of sixth-graders," she said. "The bad ones.

They've done it to all us first-graders. We all look like this.

"Trout fishing in America.' What does it mean? I just got

this sweater new from my grandma. "

"Huh.'Trout fishing in America', " the principal said."Tell

Miss Robins I'll be down to see her in a little while," and

excused the girl and a short time later we terrorists were

summoned up from the lower world.

We reluctantly stamped into the principal's office, fidgeting

and pawing our feet and looking out the windows and yawning

and one of us suddenly got an insane blink going and putting

our hands into our pockets and looking away and then back

again and looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling, how

much it looked like a boiled potato, and down again and at the

picture of the principal's mother on the wall. She had been a

star in the silent pictures and was tied to a railroad track.

"Does 'Trout fishing in America' seem at all familiar to

you boys?" the principal said. "I wonder if perhaps you've

seen it written down anywhere today in your travels? 'Trout

fishing in America.' Think hard about it for a minute."

We all thought hard about it.

There was a silence in the room, a silence that we all

knew intimately, having been at the principal's office quite a

few times in the past.

"Let me see if I can help you," the principal said. "Perhaps

you saw 'Trout fishing in America' written in chalk on

the backs of the first-graders. I wonder how it got there."

We couldn't help but smile nervously.

"I just came back from Miss Robin's first-grade class,"

the principal said. "I asked all those who had 'Trout fishing

in America' written on their backs to hold up their hands,and

all the children in the class held up their hands, except one

and he had spent his whole lunch period hiding in the lavatory.

What do you boys make of it . . . ? This 'Trout fishing in

America' business?"

We didn't say anything.

The one of us still had his mad blink going. I am certain

that it was his guilty blink that always gave us away. We

should have gotten rid of him at the beginning of the sixth

grade.

"You're all guilty, aren't you?" he said. "Is there one of

you who isn't guilty? If there is, speak up. Now. "

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

Suddenly I could hear his God-damn eye blinking. It was very much

like the sound of an insect laying the 1, 000, 000th egg of our

disaster.

"The whole bunch of you did it. Why? . . . Why 'Trout

fishing in America' on the backs of the first-graders?"

And then the principal went into his famous E=MC2 sixth-

grade gimmick, the thing he always used in dealing with us.

"Now wouldn't it look funny, " he said. "If I asked all your

teachers to come in here, and then I told the teachers all to

turn around, and then I took a piece of chalk and wrote 'Trout

fishing in America' on their backs?"

We all giggled nervously and blushed faintly.

"Would you like to see your teachers walking around all

day with 'Trout fishing in America' written on their backs,

trying to teach you about Cuba? That would look silly, wouldn't

it? You wouldn't like to see that would you? That wouldn't do

at all, would it?"

"No," we said like a Greek chorus some of us saying it

with our voices and some of us by nodding our heads, and

then there was the blink, blink, blink.

"That's what I thought, " he said. "The first-graders look

up to you and admire you like the teachers look up to me and

admire me, It just won't do to write 'Trout fishing in America'

on their backs. Are we agreed, gentlemen?"

We were agreed.

I tell you it worked every God-damn time.

Of course it had to work.

"All right, " he said. "I'll consider trout fishing in Ameri-

ca to have come to an end. Agreed?"

"Agreed. "

"Agreed ?"

"Agreed. "

"Blink, blink. "

But it wasn't completely over, for it took a while to get

trout fishing in America off the clothes of the first-graders.

A fair percentage of trout fishing in America was gone the

next day. The mothers did this by simply putting clean

clothes on their children, but there were a lot of kids whose

mothers just tried to wipe it off and then sent them back to

school the next day with the same clothes on, but you could

still see "Trout fishing in America" faintly outlined on their

backs. But after a few more days trout fishing in America

disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very

beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade.


Richard Brautigan

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
I justjust remember my own goodname still.

Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face?
Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place,
stuck a dog's body under, hung same from a hook,
wrote what-all on my forehead! Wrote 'bastard'! Wrote 'crook'!
I justjust recall how my face used to look.

Now, misters and sisters, they've come for my voice.
If the Cat got my tongue, look who-who would rejoice—
muftis, politicos, 'my own people', hacks.
Still, nameless-and-faceless or not, here's my choice:
not to shut up. To sing on, in spite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.

Salman Rushdie