Wallace Stevens
Wazzup?
With the widows and the maidens?
The name
dropping
the distancing vocabulary that
we scurry to look up
look up
train our eyes
train.
If I came into your office, in downtown
Hartford a city
I knew framed - as my father grew up in
Wethersfield always said
be careful –
downtown Hartford is
not a good place to be alone.
So I saunter, prink, and
perambulate
plonk myself
past your receptionist.
A widow?
And she’d holler:
-Mr. Wallace I asked her to stop!
And your desk which you requested almost 15 years ago
already looks out of date in too heavy oak is
caught between us, a horizontal surface filled
with paper.
There will be one sentence.
And one exclamatory remark.
-Wallace, you’re only human -  you put your pants on
one leg at a time.
-No!
he says, jumping up from his desk,
-Watch!
He undoes his belt, he drops his trousers
he steps out of them –
He steps out one leg at a time.
BUT
Wallace Stevens, god bless him,
arranges his pants carefully on the floor of the
Hartford Accident
and
Indemnity Company
just so.
And grinning,
hops into both puddled legs
at the same time.
Then bends over and hoists the waistband
the belt dangling
in triumph.
Lesson learned.
Learned, schooled like
St. Ursule with her radishes
Just another lady
Just another confabulist
Just another story.

Petty theft of pretty poetry so
taut like my buttocks when I was twenty
and did not appreciate the ripeness of my
flesh.
Or this – about an orange peel –
the white is bitter the spits of oil
not iridescent as oil might be
lazed
in a parking lot puddle.
Try for size the heavy fur of
winter cottages, blah except for
holiday wreaths and the silent exhalation of
smokes snaking from their
top.
Translate this grapefruit that is both
sour and sweet
and fulminates
loss.

Techno-blurts bleed between neon corners.
And she walks among the flashing lights,
an illuminated epidemic.

His name is Arthur Brunswick,
or so the rumor goes and goes.
Art. Artie. God of Death.
With a hand on a gun,
the other on the pulse of America --
redundant --
his eyes slide up and down
her shimmers of symmetry.

If there's another place, somewhere,
he said bedding tobacco behind lip,
Let me know. Hell, let yourself know.
There would be no greater shame
than becoming a mystery,
even to yourself.

Whether or not she is nameless,
she strutted around body of the room,
untouched by the God of Death.
Stopping, her stare turned towards his,
Your name isn't Arthur Brunswick.
I know this, you know this.
Whether or not, you say my name,
you know who I am.
No matter who you say you are,
I have known what you are
since we were created
to be in this room.

They both turned their heads towards the ceiling,
waiting for the author to acknowledge them.
But he couldn't -- wouldn't -- for whatever reason
he told himself over and over and forever.

He grinned, Arthur of course, before saying,
This may not be entirely original, but you
cannot, will not be saved. Even by him.
There are a thousand girls like you,
nameless, an object of a wanna-be
pseudo-provocative, pretentious, poem --
Too many P's, big guy; let's tone it down.

Listen, this ******, he said as he pointed up,
wants to be David Foster Wallace;
all soft-spoken, trying too hard to be smart --
which came effortlessly to Wallace, not him --
but I can tell you what he doesn't want to be:
The person that saves you. Your messiah.
Are we using any words correctly, yeah?


Either way, he doesn't want to save you.
You are meant to die -- you're going to die --
know how I know that? Because. Because he...
He, Arthur pointed towards the ceiling,
He is telling me what to say, and these words
are leaving my mouth. You die, I die -- **** --
I die... I don't want to die, but we die.
Maybe you could have all of this dialogue,
but it's common for his males to, well,
you know, be interesting and somewhat developed.

Her body, pearl and on the verge of objectification,
had glimmers swim across her moon-crater-pores.
Looking up, as she had throughout her
line-by-line life, she asked the creator what next.
And, before she was given another breath,
the neon of the lights dissolved into her skin,
burning her alive, eating her alive;
her body falling apart, disintegrating.
Fatty rain drops of blood, bile, and memory,
gathered at the danced-upon tiles.

Arthur, frozen in the now disco heat,
swung his face towards the stripped away ceiling,
a lava sky staring back at him, waiting to choose.
He said *******, He said Just ******* do it,
and, at first, he was to live, out of spite,
but the temptation of choosing death over life
was too great for the author.

Arthur's skin flew across the room,
in differing shapes and sizes,
clinging onto the lights, revealing
the God of Death: the reader,
the absentee father, the scarred brother,
the crooked teeth heart-breaker,
the author, himself.

The pearl girl woke up, next to the author,
in a place in a space in his head,
telling him that she had the strangest dream.

Yellow soap for a yellow me.
I don't feel like being pure
means being happy.

- I scrub scarring
with more definition
than a dictionary.

Moldy bread kissing
gravid navel oranges,
in a cherry plastic rib cage.

- Can you find me altruism
hidden in the heart  
of ecstasy and rage?

Satellite bobbing above
the air supply,
are you out of reach or am I?

She was taking pictures
of us in the aphotic zone.
Saying, it was the only way
to capture me vulnerable.

Extirpate my species
to save my life.
I am saturnine for
the only adoration I accept  
is mine.

Altogether, the night we wove
a trickled treasure, tangled:
skirted legs spilling out from
the teacup of a denim lap,
validation in the vacuum cove.

- Dusty Nikes before the dusk,
who art in heaven, my god
he thrusts.

- Why'd your mother
let you talk that way:
You smoke cliche cigarettes
in such an unfamiliar way.

- The hanger left welts, weeping
into post-relevance landline love,
body lay like the hands on the clock,
copper landmarks seeping.

What a feeling, ever so same.
Arched eyebrows, a trademarked shame:
like a fighter, like ****** oozing.
Like a functional inability,
divine in its losing.

So I wrote a Notorious word to the Crook King
of Brooklyn who wrote the street book
Based on how the street he took
with feet quite fleet.
You know his spirit i did meet,
first last year on bicycle day
A tab of acid found its way
on my tongue it lay,
in the bathroom mirror I was prone to say,
"Biggie Smalls, Biggie Smalls, Biggie Smalls" and my heart did in fear fall,
Thought to myself
"I swear I hear a glock click near my left ear" so I got the hell out of there.
The second time was a bit more fair,
the air of a fellow player, yao slanger,
beat banger, he spat a 16 bar prayer
of how he was an unknowing player
In His plan a silent hand of hope
for all the ****** that are broke.
That the Sky is the limit,
only make moves when your heart's in it,
then you are guaranteed to win it.
Ain't no sin against it,
**** the world don't ask it for ****;
that's word to BIG

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

"Who calls their child wallace"

"The same"

"The same what?"

"The same sort of people that called you a blessing when you were born"