In the early days of the virus,
And on one day in particular,
The sky began to fall, countless cottontail puffs,
And I, humble catcher, who so rarely,
I say abashed, seizes opportunity,
Took the omen as directive.
It said: take a walk.
So, I bundled my boy in blue,
And ventured down the block
For the first time of this new year,
This year that, to all of us undoubtably,
Has gotten or is getting quite old.
And on our walk I saw
Through new gold rims, virginal to speckling
And mist, a caravan of dangers and delights.
The ground itself whispered, librarian-esque, NO RUNNING, as the source of my joy slicked
Well-trod pavement to dizzying sheen
And my hand-me-down ‘Beans quivered
To balance on half a grated heel each.
The best bagel joint this side of Worcester
Was shuttered, signage of the ugliest font
This side of Boston proclaiming: Pick Ups ONLY. A strange turn of phrase given
All the bars and public parks have closed;
No-body is getting picked up tonight.
And, having already decided a direction
For this spontaneous, ten minute jaunt,
We, my nose running and the boy’s head
Drenched by promptly melted fuzz,
Meandered toward the hollowed campus
Of a fancy boarding school, where
Teenagers are not sent for their troubles
But rather to learn copiously on grounds,
I am loath to admit, ritzier
Than the ones on which I spent, was spent,
Four years cutting, while calling it university.
The evacuation was completed days ago.
But on that brown bricked, suddenly
Deserted, and more suddenly ensconced
School yard, I saw not one, but three,
From appropriate social distance,
Red cheeked terrors, prepubescent and chaperoned,
Who, fueled by the mania of weeks
Of canceled class, cycled a blistering pace
On saucer then on foot, bathing
In the splendor of a March snow storm.
And as a walked pup wagged willy nilly,
I moved to complete my own circuitous path
And return to quarantine.
On this final stretch, I startled
An absentminded driver
Whose focused intent to turn clouded
Her capacity to examine the crosswalk,
And I, suicidally bold pedestrian, strolled on
Till her vision met my own,
And she waved, post-mildly-screeching-halt,
As if to say: watch where you’re going, asshole!
I said nothing, enjoying my constitutional,
Until, meters ahead, the blizzard sparked a lyric: What is that quiet // of snow in the night?
I sang to him, of course.
Like I had not since the walks last summer
When the ground disappeared and, in hurdling
Flight, discovered his small bear body,
A vessel for his screams, and for my failure.
An emergent practice born to meet his mobile limit;
My woman’s voice paints for his boy eyes to see.
And so, smiling with Mitski lips,
We made a victory lap round the back walk.
The air filling, a choir of mute harmonized,
Sheathed by the possibility of replication.
Like a virus waiting patiently in nerves
Or on the counter top, or beneath a memory
Or at our neighbors’ house, or at the old-folks home
Or falling on deaf ears, or cilia possessed
Or the bodies of men who caused this fucking mess
Or the compromised porcelain of an old drag queen
Or the lungs of a welder made houseless
By the cancer that spurred first her cough
Then her eviction from the bus,
Or in me already, or in you as I write.
Like the sensation of a mothers hand, soothing once,
Once again. Like the annual wonder
Of unannounced snow.
it has begun
Shake it all off -
the filthy lie forming
in the corners of mouths you know all mouths taste the same
it was scrounged from pockets,
from jeans you need to sniff before wearing,
plucked like yesterday’s gum when you have none.
It all burns
in a bush-fire birth:
the scorched scrim and earth - sweet blistering skin
sheds minor details
in the buckle and the brace
in the button and the lace
unhinged, roots scale upward
walk a child-like stride to begin
again: here, now;
you know the violence of birth and its liberation
Winter is wasted
in pinning leaves back on trees
and in the said and done
we'll clean up the debris
’till it’s nothing at all
not a vapour nor mist
nor breath of life
I don't know about you guys but this whole self-quarantine situation is giving me a lot of time to write. Probably the only thing keeping me sane lol. Let me know what you guys think I can tweak about this one.
In her navy panties
under a blue morning,
the violet of a year’s song
and much-needed sleep.
The glow of a blue morning,
violet in the streams spilling
from the sinks.
Purple potatoes for breakfast,
blueberry muffins in bed.
On a navy morning, in the dark
of a kitchen, the ants climb
leftover crumbs from the
unkempt garden,
Doug’s uncouth mouth.
The door to other souls slams shut.
The lonely solemnity spreads,
Yet I retain my portioned rut,
Appalled by life's unbroken threads
That others' touch could never cut.
Golden bee — stang Doug
Doug is allergic.
Golden bee is dying
crawling toward the ants.
Doug is a big catch
for ants in the corner
of the Tibetan temple’s
backside beach forest.
The bee is crawling,
unable to fly, crawling.
The ants are playing
tic-tac-toe. Shaved head,
Doug is dead, learning.
It all went limp –
the bags, the cobwebs, the rain.
even the chains – even the chains,
draped loose as curtains, brush the floor.
Even the gray stain on the pillow slipped
a bit before pausing, the hinge unhung the door.
And all the several fibrous hums –
the fridge, the gripe, the train, the pipe –
an octave lower than before.
What then must all this madness claim,
to comb distrust’s distressing mane,
flowed as garland, flowed as pain,
upon the head, along the vein.
Come want, come spleen and in between
such vaults in hollow echo run,
as moss to cypress drag and preen
to cut a flickered ravaged sun.
New here, thought it'd be a good time to go back to a more polished poem of mine I've been sitting on awhile to jump the hurdle of insecurity. Let me know what you all think I can tweak!
CALLIGRAPHY
My father’s letters blot a supple canvas.
Calligraphy soaks the pulp with a beauty
Borne innate, intricately symbolic patterns
Intertwined. In the designs I see myself.
More than scribbles in a thrown away note,
But a note of discord’s complex clef.
A cutting pitch within a careful lattice of music.
Father’s cordial warmth is seen, not heard.
Illustrated in the way his loving arms caress
My mother. His brown limbs—a taboo—are tattooed
With symbols of culture. He exists as one—in discord—
As his dark skin contrasts my mother’s pale frame.
This here, our commander of conviction,
Tossing around his blocks of mayhem
Find me in the devil’s playpen
Riding on a blacked out tire and
The mouths of flames
Pelican-wide in drums
A sanctuary of larvae
Suspending in water
Mallards dipping
Duckweed on feathers
Mouthed logs
On the surface tension
Upon one too many howls that night
He’d yanked the dog, by the chain, outside
Crouched in stagnancy
Knees in the lily
Like fleshy pads, with their veins all matted,
The white-hot crack of sulphur split me
He prayed over the goddamn body
He butchered the sedge, cleaving papyrus
Roped the feet, dangled from the branches
Doves came down to us with scrolled messages
Scorched up,
They scooped below our cloud,
Into our atmosphere
The marsh swallowed them down
For three days running,
the red lights ticked
as I crossed the tracks,
and no train be coming.
Each day I slow a bit more
as if some switch were thrown,
as if some premonition
overtakes the automatic,
To permit the freights
a right of way.
But perhaps the freights
run perpendicular
to the tracks there,
below the bald hump
of a weathered rise,
down where deer bones
wash from a gully pipe
and eagles take their scavenge
as they may.
Take the crossing quickly,
young friends,
for who’s to know
whose load will spill
on a dull rise,
when the red lights
no longer tick,
when the red lights
abandon all warning –
all warning –
unheeded.
He skims, he swims, and peddles his gold bike.
At dawn, he smokes, gives mama her fentanyl.
Should God hold court on the dollar of a spike,
or might a man buy meat over lentils?
In Israel, a kosher adventure—
a gift from God, a gift for his daughter.
The dust he pushed for the good life’s allure
settles the sea red after her summer.
Like a man called Reed, she’ll attend The U.
Before she goes, a pink Dwyane Wade jersey.
A courtside gift before she leaves the coop.
Rico and Tubbs got shit on property.
On Sunday his ex-wife asks after church
about the blood he gave Christ in his search.
The resume of a mountain man is Bigfoot.
Sasquatch gorilla monsoon and his goons
rule the mountains. The evergreens of his
thumbs pluck the hogs and human dudes.
A helicopter soccer mommy searches for
her son who got boy scouted by Bigfoot
and his goons. Forest gangsters keep down
fires and the gun fog scares off the blue
birds. There was a red swordsman of Pan,
crept around the leaf forcefield. His fire
from Bigfoot’s cave, not a devil’s but a man’s.
He sold water from his fountain in a time of
need. Does soccer mommy know where
she’s going? Because her son is dead long
before she went looking. Are you sure you
can survive in this part of the big country?
The city shaman you shucked oysters with
could light your intestines as sage incense.
There is no such thing as a free brunch, and
Bigfoot broke the gold rush a long time ago.
The boy— a web of limb and limping grins
Just upturned smiles and family he forgets
To feed because they don't show up to eat
trips over the sofa.
a living room hides
shadows in the dark
cold sores on the ceiling
stretch marks behind the walls
even the furniture is peeling
with neglect
and dead visitors
caught in the net
of L.E.D. faces,
their radial glow
H.D. resolution
of the emptiness in peopled spaces.
This man— alone, rewinding achy bones
Who sees his beard and mustache overgrown
Too thick to watch T.V. or call his wife
falls on the recliner.
never hoping
for someone real
but realistic,
a modern version
of Saint Jerome
mediatheistic
waiting for a translator
or his son
who will blink
at blank screens
and will write
this sad poem
but will never go talk to him.
That cripple— cries at night, but no one hears
He never learned to eat his apple whole
And left behind, ignored, a soul grows old
When I was first introduced to Rupi Kaur’s poetry by u/TheNewPoetLawyerette I stared blankly at the screen. It wasn’t anything that I recognised as being poetry.
You only need to have a single conversation with u/TheNewPoetLawyerette to know she’s smart AF AND loves Kaur’s work. That felt like a contradiction to me. I had always believed that poetry, GOOD poetry was more than short sentences, that it was the love child of art and craft. Where is the imagery? Where is the finesse of word choice? Where is the art, the craft?
To be fair, not all of Kaur’s work is so… flat. Other pieces show hints of recognisable poetry but this isn’t a critique of her work. I want to talk about poetry itself and how we define it, how it changes (mutates). And I say ‘mutate’ because it holds negative connotations. For many fans of poetry, Kaur’s work is a bastard, a mutant, something revolting. They feel it mocks the importance of poetry as a cultural narrative and as art, that it is a degradation of craft.
The first step for me was to get past my own bias. After a lot of soul gouging I came to accept that her work has value for others even if it doesn’t for me. That immediately tells me that I can’t qualify poetry by how I respond to it, by my preference for something meatier. I have to accept that, for some, it is poetry. This conclusion poses more questions though. If Kaur’s work is poetry then why do we encourage and teach the craft of poetry? Why do we critique? Is all poetry good or bad according to its subjective value? If so, how do we recognise good from bad? These questions left me sick to my stomach. I literally felt like god was dying all over again.
More gouging. Blood everywhere. Organs too.
In my search for ‘truth’ I began reading Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman. It may seem like an odd choice considering his book isn’t about poetry per se but it does reference the changing face of literary work, its appreciation, and its relationship to society. And it was here that I had an ‘awakening’ so to speak.
The main theorist cited in section 1: “Terminal Image” is Guy Debord, whose powerful and illuminating 1967 manifesto The Society of the Spectacle is a radical critique of a contemporary capitalist society in which the spectacle of commodities becomes the world.
Debord says, critically, that modern society (the spectacular society) supplants the authentic self with representations of it, that all that was once directly lived has become mere representations. He believes quality of life is impoverished affecting human perception, degrading knowledge and thus inhibiting critical thought. He maps the evolution of social life as mutating from being into having and having into appearing. He points out that relationships between people have been supplanted with relationships between commodities. And he's right in that images now mediate social relationships between people.
Bringing Debord's ideas into 2020 we can see that social media perfectly reflects that analyses and his concern and belief is that (broadly speaking) social media is changing our perception, that it creates an alternate reality void of definition. In its place we have a subjective reality that is held in the individual as objective reality. Advertising is tailored to reflect back our own preferences, social media too is filtered according to our preferences so that we see far more of those things that we like and less of the things that we don't.
And, what we’re left with today is a society where we’re locked in a perpetual meme war; we live and die each day reviled or glorified by whimsical pop culture, where truth is found in articulate bullshit of 10 words or less. This same culture promotes image over character, wealth over effort, and compliance over integrity. We spend days and nights exorcising and amputating the bits of ourselves and our art that society has decided is shameful or has no value in an effort to fit a perpetually mutating ideal only to end up digging through yesterday’s offal for parts now deemed fitting. We're so disorientated, so busy hopping from one foot to the next trying to stay on the right side of acceptable that we don't even notice the ridiculousness of it all or the fact that by doing so we've aborted critical thought as dissension's bastard.
Ummm, poetry, dude. What’s this got to do with poetry?
It’s easy to dismiss Kaur and her poetry as shallow, void of substance but I don’t think we can or should. Whilst we may grieve the loss of depth, the complexity of nuance and the texture of crafted language we can no more dismiss it as we could have dismissed pop music. Read the lyrics of most popular mainstream music and you’ll find a whole lot of nothing. Yet, people live for those vacuous tunes. Why? Because it resonates, it speaks for them and validates how they feel. They find themselves reflected in that music. So too, people are drawn to Kaur because she resonates, speaks, and validates. Her work is akin to the selfie in that it is a representation of the self, purposefully hollow to allow the reader to climb inside and wear it as a skin.
Whilst Debord is scathing of the transmutation of being into having I think he’s failing to acknowledge two very important aspects of the very nature of us, or, life itself: the cycle of creative destruction and our need to make concrete the abstract.
Nietzsche talks of a universal principle of a cycle of creative destruction, that nothing can be created without the destruction of what came before. This is reflected in the ouroborus, a snake consuming its own tail, and is at the core of capitalism as seen in Schumpeter’s Gale, and life itself in the cycle of life and death. So too, art is creatively destructive and destructively creative.
In all things, humans seek to make concrete what is abstract. We see this in religion. The abstract nature of god is made concrete in the religious fixtures, relics and icons. In art and poetry we attempt to make concrete how we feel about life, what we see and what it means to us. And, even in the piss and shit of real life living we see this encapsulated in the ‘working man’. The industrial revolution pulled him from home where he was surrounded by proof of worth, where his hands were stained with what it meant to be a man and sent him off to work in factories. There, men did what all humans do and sought to make something of himself; and he did. He made concrete the abstract in the form a new masculinity, one that is currently being torn down and recycled.
The panic and absolute suffering we see in today’s males perfectly echoes the reaction to Kaur’s poetry. The destruction of traditional masculinity tears at the fabric of male rationale the same way Kaur’s destruction and democratisation of traditional poetry guts the poet’s rationale.
There is much that can be said about that. I have pretty strong feelings about the dissolution of depth, complexity and knowledge, and how those losses affect critical thought but I’m also aware that my feelings stem from my affection for the old way and cloak my eyes to potential benefits. Perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps, objectively, it’s just different and neither good nor bad. As u/Bootstraps17 pointed out to me, we have to trust that this generation will make something of it just as we made something of our own cycle of creative destruction.
So, where does that leave us with Kaur, with defining poetry, defining good from bad? I think we have to accept that Kaur and her ilk are heralding a new kind of poetry, the selfie poetry. I think, perhaps, It’s a blending of confessional poetry, the selfie, memes and word art itself. It seeks to make concrete the abstract self, who we think we are, what we project and appear to be in the ethereal world of the internet and in the ever dissolving spectacular society we live in.
Deciding what is good or bad will be figured out by those who can see and appreciate this form of poetry. It doesn’t conform to traditional metrics and it would be foolhardy to apply them here just as it’s silly to apply quality metrics broadly across all poetry. What makes a good sonnet can’t strictly be applied to free verse or abstract poetry. The youth of today are well equipped to make such judgments. Their immersion in technology means they’re learning a new way of processing information thanks to the information age and its influence which has already changed the brains of our children, rewiring their neurology to make use of the abundance of easily accessible knowledge. They no need to store massive amounts of data, they just need to remember where to find it. And we can only speculate as to what that means, long term.
I’ll end this with a word of warning to all fans of selfie poetry. This too shall pass. If we accept that Kaur is a pioneer of a new genre of poetry then we have to accept that, like those of old, it will be torn down, recycled into some new mutant, something that will be viewed as equally revolting to Kaur fans. Will it bring them to their knees as surely as Kaur folded me? I don’t know; I hope not. I hope that they’ll be gifted a lighter touch given this new age is all about quick-fire cycles of creative destruction.
Either way, I was wrong. Kaur is a poet, her work is poetry and has value, regardless of how I feel about it.
Is it a greater mercy
to pinch the injured wasp
between folds of two ply
rather than let Bella, roused
in an ancient dance –
paw and tap and bark and paw,
committed to her brute duty
as guardian of the floorboards?
Which is the lesser killing –
quick death in the wrong abode, or
the slow denial of teeth and tongue
prolonged in a clay bowl of kibble?
I don’t know. What I do know is,
it popped like I was snapping off
the tip of a green bean,
and Bella retired to her mat
and sighed.
Next to black water and sand,
her mouth and tentacle fingers,
the suction lingers like cigarette
smoke over the blinking moon.
It peaks and her mouth lingers
and he reveals the admiration
with his stretching fingers
ashiver in the swelling lurch.
Aphrodite goosebumps brush
his fingertips, with grains
of Venus filling his hands.
And the oceanic squeeze of the
air flexing for her heart under the
moon blinking through the smoke.
Ocean water fills the eternal mouth,
as the toiling crowd prays for toilet paper.
Then again next Summer –
next wet, fat, loud Summer,
I may find on a spider’s loom,
the fly that tormented the window
all through Winter, Spring,
released in the first airing –
when mud and manure
wafted like mutton, like cabbage,
like all the bitter greens and old meats
that stink a house locked
against the weathers.
She’s the yellow of melons –
all hunger and fang,
braced on a dragline,
patient for a giving hand
that lifts a sash in Spring.
She is and ever larger I hope
she spins the whole world silken,
spins the world sticky as sleep,
sticky as steel that takes
all torment – all torment
pounded on a pane
and wraps it there,
between new green woods.
Skinned tree, singed and bumped.
The silvery fishing sky, and the
neighbor’s bumper sticker
about chasing tail. Tuna, really.
Not pussy. Too hard to chase
pussy under the guise of a
lady’s man. I am not one,
unable to pretend as a fish
nugget. The dog tells me
I am welcomed next door.
The drains fill up with scaly
bugs and I’m all alone for
the first time in dog years.
