Silent Running

I’ve been deathly quiet in this medium for a long time now. I had a lot of big, clever, funny things I’d been saving up to say. Then Tuesday happened: and suddenly, I didn’t feel very big or very clever, and nothing seemed very funny.

I spent Tuesday night in church, which is not unusual in itself—that’s the night for choir practice. About two hours before the scheduled practice I was strongly considering cancelling—then I got a call that there a special Mass had been hastily arranged for 8:30 PM, and I said Let’s do it.

Only a few people showed for 7:00 rehearsal, but they were all game to stay and sing the Mass immediately following. We threw ourselves into the task of assembling a program of songs with a certain jolly desperation: C’mon, kids, let’s put on a show!—singing songs to keep the dark away. But as the church slowly filled with people, familiar faces made strange by an uncharacteristic whapped-upside-the-head-with-a-stout-plank cast to their expressions, I knew that this was the place to be. At least singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” with a lump in my throat felt a hell of a lot more useful than chewing my cuticles bloody in front of CNN.

I’m worried now about what choices my role might force me to take in the weeks and months ahead—what songs I will be asked to sing, in pursuit of what agendas. The church has an obvious role in bringing aid and comfort, and in asking mercy and blessing upon our nation and our people: but the church can also be used to whip a people into a belligerent frenzy (glory, glory hallelujah!), and of that I want no part.

Small problems, indeed. Pray for me. For all of us.

All your base are belong to us.

Sounds pretty fucking stupid six months on, doesn't it?

What were we thinking? And what d'you think Mahir is up to these days?

Molly Bish, one year on:

Creepy as it seems to obsess over one of "the children who never made it home," the synchronicities are getting to me. It's easy to treat it as fodder for gags in poor taste...

...until I see this, which is just plain disturbing: a letter, written by Molly Bish some six years before her abduction, to the family of Holly Piirainen, who's on the list linked above—#990 with a bullet.

"My name is Molly Bish. I am 10-years-old. Some day I would like to come see you. I am very sorry. I wish I could make it up to you. Holly is a very pretty girl. She is almost as tall as me. I wish I knew Holly. I hope they found her."

Molly signed it with love and several X's and O's for hugs and kisses and enclosed a picture of her family...

“I wish I knew Holly,” she wrote. In the end, perhaps she did, better than anyone else could: the two of them, bound in a weird sort of sisterhood. A sorority of victims.

I wish I knew Holly.

Why do I have Emily Dickinson’s lines in my head...?

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me

Maybe Molly Bish found what she was looking for, when she stepped off the path and out of the world, thumbing down Death on a country road, with Holly gone ahead to blaze the trail: now they walk, cold hand in cold hand.

I wish I could make it up to you

I wish I could make it up to you.

Poetry Clinic: Father's Milk

Some time ago, when beloved Tom was first soliciting (oo-er) articles for the webzine, one of his suggested topics was

Everything you ever wanted to know about male nipples but were afraid to ask.

Well, now. I can't speak for everyone, mind you... But

• I started wearing undershirts—usually sleeveless old-man undershirts—a few years ago, because my nipples chafed like a bastard.
• I have always worn my guitar slung low, like a punk rocker, even though I'm primarily an acoustic player, in order to avoid "guitarist's nipple," which complaint is not uncommon.
• Someone else who wears his guitar slung low is Joe Perry.
• Although I usually have the decency to cover up, Joe often performs shirtless--so you really can't help but notice his nipples, the areolae of which are very large and dark: a local radio commentator once referred to them as "tomato slices."
• A good friend of mine has three. He is also red-haired and left-handed, and three hundred years ago would doubtless have been burned as a witch.
• A truly remarkable thing happened to my left nipple exactly five years ago, shortly after my daughter was born, and I wrote this poem about it...

... which is my sneaky way of ushering in a belated edition of the Poetry Clinic.

Father’s Milk

This girl-child, born in August, so bereft
of fortune as to be my daughter—
an angel sired somehow by an ass.
That’s got to hurt; I’m just doing my best
to take away the sting.

When the nights are hot, these first weeks,
and none of us can sleep, I rise
in swampy undershorts, and wander
rooms made unfamiliar by fatigue,
singing Irish songs to the angel
in my arms, hoping the baritone buzzing
of my chest will render her insensible.

Her little head is to my left breast,
to hear the beating of my heart.
Her cries are tiny, animal sounds,
the bleating of the holy lamb.
She twists in my embrace,
her head on its boneless neck a-thrash
from side to side. And then—

a shock; her lips fall slick
with spittle to my slack and
useless tit. I protest—but
my nip, such as it is
and ringed in fur, is in her mouth
and her tongue a-tease in vain
for milk. She hoovers til I yelp
in pain and break the seal, and
that hurts even worse.

There is tender absurdity
in this, but also shame—just as
when I bathe her (and at this age,
the easiest way’s to draw a bath,
get in oneself, and hold her
in one’s lap), I tuck the apostrophe
of my sex between parenthetical
parental thighs—you never know what
will come up on the therapist’s couch,
thirty years from now—and don’t say
anything I wouldn’t want to hear
read back in court. The ass
saw the angel, and it gave him pause.

Warm water laps her rose-petal skin
soaping her delicate creases
and my coarseness and scars.
Hot water in August. Steam.
Sweat beads on my collarbone,
and I come from the bath
more wilted than before.

And when her lips implore
these buttons, pink and pointless
vestigial mammalian, I wonder
what do I have to offer? what suckle
can I give fit for this angel?

I will sing to her, and fill her head
with poetry and hero tales. But is that
what she requires of me? What’s a father for?
What good, if any, will she draw from me,
now hunched sore and hurting, helpless
to give her what she needs?

Will this be how it always is? Will she
Connect with me mistakenly,
hungering for something
that I cannot give? but even so,
connect—and even so
it hurts to break the bond.

for Pamela Glenn Menke
and Claire Meredith Feerick

What do you think, sirs?

I'm back.

I know, I know: how many times have you heard that one before? But there it is.

After weeks of deprivation, Herculean effort and many late nights of headbusting hassle, none of it attributable to the fine people on the Tech Support staffs at AOL, Verizon, or Efficient Networks, to whom I decline to link and to whom I would never, ever refer as a greasy-thumbed, chunder-skulled fuck-knuckles, my Internet access from home has been restored.

No more surreptitious lurking from my dayjob workstation! My newfound electronic emancipation, now rediscovered, brings joy to all. It's good for productivity, it's good for Barbelith, it's good for America. Dammit.

I am returned to the fold.
Fear my wrath.
Making up for lost time shall I be, yusss.

Outage

Please to excuse lack of bloggery: 'net access from home is, how you say, fucked.

That'll be sorted this weekend, thinks I.

Or someone dies horribly.

That is all.

Ride the Snake

Oh. My. God.
I have no words.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Jim Morrison Simulatron.

Weird scenes inside the gold mine, baby.

(requires Flash)

God, that is appalling, isn’t it? Utterly tasteless. I’m horrified.

Worse still, I wasn’t the first one to make the joke.

History's Greatest Monster

Last June, Massachusetts teenager Molly Bish was abducted.

A composite sketch of the prime suspect has been released.



Damn you, Josef Stalin! Damn you to Hell!

Poetry Clinic: Paul Robeson Sings "The Minstrel Boy"

All right, screw it. June’s Poetry Clinic entry was to have been a noble experiment, but I find myself without the skill or know-how right now—so it’s on to July, to a meditation on American freedom as we near our Independence Day celebration, and to another experiment in form: this one’s a gloss, or an extrapolation/expansion of an existing work. Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia defines it thus:

In prosody, a poetic composition which is a variation on a theme. A “texte” is chosen from some poetic work, and succeeding stanzas use a line or a couplet of the texte as the last line or line until it has all appeared in the composition.

My texte is a snippet of the Irish folk song that’s quoted in full as the poem’s epigram. This one, by the way, is great fun to perform live, especially with a drum—and every time I do so, I hear Not Drowning, Waving’s “Crazy Birds” in my head.

Paul Robeson Sings “The Minstrel Boy”

The minstrel boy to the war has gone
in the ranks of Death ye will find him.
His father’s sword he hath girded on
and his wild harp slung behind him.
“Land of song,” cried the warrior bard,
“Though all the world betrays thee,
One valiant sword still thy rights shall guard,
one loving heart hall praise thee.”

The minstrel fell, but the foeman’s chain
could not drag his proud soul under.
The harp he loved ne’er spoke again
for he’s torn its cords asunder
and said, “No chain shall sully thee,
thou soul of love and bravery!
Thy songs were made for the proud and free;
They shall never sound in slavery!”

Burned-cork paint
ringed with titanium white
His grin gone faint
away from the sodium light
His tap shoes are sold and his banjo pawned—
The minstrel boy to the war has gone.

In the burning fields
of tobacco and cotton
Virginia reels
Is he lost or forgotten?
The answer comes on the reeking wind;
In the ranks of Death ye will find him.

On bended knee
with a Jolson smile
He has sung “Swannee”
down many a Jim Crow mile
Now no more step-and-fetch, shuck-and-jive begone—
His father’s sword he hath girded on.

His blood run red
of a political hue
but the house that he lived in is the house that we live in
He was bled, in his own way, for me and for you
But he straightened his back for the firing line
With his wild harp slung behind him.

I’m attracted to forms like the gloss and the villanelle—there’s a freedom in the discipline, in the way it forces me to express myself more concisely. A challenge to write, but also a pleasure—prosody as crossword puzzle.

I’ve shown you mine: now you show me yours.