Of Parties and Awards
Too many poets smiling from back covers
quilts festooned with praise
too many dedications to estranged wives, hated husbands,
once innocent children, forever guilty parents
the usual weeds that stifle Bosch-like imagination
and now twitter, this moment’s rage
preempting the tweets of undomesticated birds
with the cawing of the art
I
a singular curmudgeon in my own eyes
dismiss the sisterhood of clucking hens
that praise everything like an over-conscientious mother
and syllablelize so insincere “ohs!”
as if each poem was baked with such love
that serendipity licked the world clean
the pristine vistas were all of enchanted harbor views
even the grief departed on a Cleopatra barge
and that silence, that place-setting without my name
that surprise that walked through the front doors
the lifted eyebrow, a monumental nudge of recognition
soon lowered by those infinitely false lashes
batting welcome like dust under a rug
my buddies, those rough drunken louts
await for descriptions of how the broads broadened their formals
the golden imitation silk narrowed into two straps
each holding the girder for those mammary treasures
that only poetry could grip at their nipples gently
and moisten and playfully chew and suck
primordial conscious adult joy
the veneer of civilization is thin
and the fancy dresses, the uniform tuxedoes
only hide the naked orgy of procreation, survival
like religion clothes the body’s death with mythic
smokes and scents into a rarefied undulating imaginative heaven
where doilies hold glasses of ambrosial adoration
and God is a light show like years back Janis at the Filmore
the poets at this party of awards, recognition, reverence
get not to talk but to sit like a musician’s score
and their part, this chorus of so serious moon-faces,
is to applaud, is to nod the head, as if each node of language
weighted the balance of expectation and memory
into that momentary echo, that riotous polite nod
of an empty head or one so demonstrative
of its own good taste—ah, the eyes closed reaction
of poetic orgasm, of social approbation, of spontaneous
murmuring from an intelligentsian heart, so educated
and degree’d agreeable in the community of
approved art—Art—the art of using words
like arranging place-settings, the rolled up napkin,
the perfectly planed napkin ring,
the pleasant pheasanted good china, the shining silverware
elegantly patterned as if Boucher were a smith
I
certainly a body of gluttonous appetite shrink into a corner
sipping a glass of water, watch while almost hidden by a column
and with others in the overflowing crowd, take all the beautiful in
with lust and hunger and thirst and inordinate unexplainable frenzy
as if a woodwind or a reed or a string atremble
with the jazzy improvisation of the moment
the swell of brotherhood, the identifying with the silver candlesticks
the medium to rare slices of a cooked carcass
juice tastefully flowing from each bit of pressure on the meat
like the poems that address the senses, the carnal feast of love
or the mythic mirages assuaging the knife of death
how civilized the pawing of women, the meows of their eyes
how they entrance me, like vampires their pride is nourished
with my adoring blood, my eyes bleed with desire
oh the imagination, devoid of any puritanical restraint
reaches its invisible arms and strips the society
of its pantaloons, and oh, if for only a fleeting moment
the dance consummates itself, all that death-forgetting,
that death-denying, that ego imprisoned in the solitary pod of skin,
the beans burst, sprout, shout in temporal exaltation
Hallelujah the bodies groan en masse on the shining hardwood
Oh, that moment before imaginative exhaustion and commonplace fact
return like the symphony of a left on cell phone
and the disrepair of a moment is too visceral
to continue private reverie
I
truly nominated for nothing but an early exit
or complete invisibility, am water left out in a glass overnight
and out of sight in the morning, not even a brush of wet
on the leaves of the social hedges
I
who am the beginning and ending of all my own personal paragraphs
clap politely for my art is the art of the extra, the nit of applause
the hush of sucking it all up
the river of movement and stillness collected between rock
and walls and channeled response, oh the irrigation of the arts
I am a drop of a river of funds raining down on the receivership
the universally universitied degreed, sealed, approved memberhood
of good experimental taste and outrageousness, socially accepted aberrations
and pushing the envelope ad infinitum eternibus ah-ah-opprobium
I
accepted like a dollar on the street
buy my stay in the arty palace of the rich, famous and recorded
I
after the party breaks up into many a ménage a trois
or retires to where it lets its envy down,
drops the formal dress and swigs champagne
with the grace of a construction worker
finally 23 stories down and relieved of all that rarefied air
I
become little i again
walk to my used car
dents, rust pits on the bumper,
rubber insulation peeling from the appointed crevices of the door
turn the ignition key
and hurry home to write my very own unpublished, unheralded
poem
I
spike my imagination with a beer
and the ghost of Charles Bukowski
the barbarian
Horror Sleaze Trash 