As threatened or promised, this is the monstrosity.  I feel like 
Berryman's imagining of Anne Bradstreet birthing: "Monster, you are 
killing me!...I did it with my body!"  Truly, I feel as though I've 
pushed at this thing forever: from the 1-1/2 page fragment C.D. liked to 
a seven page (in Word) exercise in everyone else's erudition, and 
something she'd probably think sucks.

All I know is I felt like a marathoner earlier today.  I was in a 
"zone," hit the wall long ago, and now could see the finish line.  I got 
there.  I felt this rush that I haven't experienced in years.

To complete the circle I need to post it.  Comments?  I'll take what I 
need and leave the rest.

This is NOT the same poem that's on my soon-to-be defunct website.

Ken

UN BACIO.  UN ALTRO BACIO.  ANCORA UN BACIO.

                      Sin without redemption is dead works.  The rest is 
commentary.

1. De Doctrina Christiana

A friend admonishes: you sexualize everything.
Yes.  Everything except sex itself.
Incest-mad Ferdinand the Duchess of Malfi's brother
goes to hunt the badger by moonlight,
his dreamed deed of darkness that does haunt me still,
that makes me wish I'd stayed a virgin--

for the first cunt is the baptismal font of misery
and physical love stomps on trailing ganglia indiscriminately,
you cannot tell yourself from your victim.

Catholics with reason sanctify the Holy Cherry: once popped,
the Masque of Love reveals the Second Circle
("Ladies lingerie, fine flammables, everyone getting off!"),
a world imaged as the Flowers of Love tarot deck,
a Rappaccini's garden of soft colors where the flowers waft poison.

2. I Walk Through the Garden of Love

Eros is Agape's rape-made bastard son by Cerberus.
He is depicted in Orthodox Church-suppressed Greek friezes
as Ronald McDonald sporting a titanic boner worthy of Lysistrata.
Configurations of Erotic joy turn vicious, dark.
Ronald is the clown of a child's circus nightmare
stuck in the machinations of the House of Atreus,
the clown of secret desire--the lover acting the beast
in a black leather mask wearing spiked fetish boots,
his love the reductio ad verum.

Yet these are only words:

for now that Age has begun its work within me,
I am supposed to Know Something I can pass along,
especially after what I have done--
young girls call me "Sir" and I want so much to say
"Don't call me that when I am picturing you undressing."
Oh my knowledge is fraudulent for still I burn, still I want!
I have become at last what I once despised
but welcome now, the vision of the Dirty Old Man
(Deo Gratias I have lived long enough despite myself to get here!).

I share the middle-aged man's common dream
a world engorged with erectile blood,
semen gushed maculate, without latex,
skin to skin squirming, slippery as heat,
the joyous dangerous game played for keeps
even when you think it is not,
this game of emotions raked like knives over unprepared skin,
forever gives the lie to the notion that sex can ever be Safe.

Why wear a scumbag since that is what you have become?
Why add redundancy to sin?

Love and be destroyed.  Write your despair,
your passion that tears into you with spikes.
Get holy cards made of your patron saints
Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Polenta.
Imagine "Lord Randall" or "Donag Og" born from joy alone,
from coupling without the agony that is all remains.
Remove the "and" between Love and Death.
Witness a woman you loved die mercifully never knowing
that you, married to her daughter, were off with another woman.
Alles ist Liebes-Tod.

2. A Night At The Opera

Passion, even when spent (a waste of shame) remains,
elemental, irreducible, reformable to solidity
from the gaseous mess of decomposition, the store of memory.
Even when it has passed into faux time it is no less real.
It is simply memory's abime de foutre, the black hole where ghosts have 
weight.
It is mockery through parallels and refractions, and it will not go away.
It is constructed time, endlessly repeatable, insidious lies like truth.
It is tuned to what we need to call Art.

In that world of faux passion, a theater curtain
will rise on a storm off the island of Cyprus.
The air reeks of sizing and greasepaint.
A 19th century orchestra hails up the curtain
with a chord that once jarred even Verdi's most passionate groupies
who could not believe that by Otello the old man
had so much blood left in him.
Accept you are in three centuries at once: 21/19/16.
It is all one, in this way changeless.
Singers throughout the evening simulate by acts
of body and voice the consequences of passion:
exultation, jealousy, fury, terror, despair, madness,
and finally the pointless--except to get faux closure--
moment of clarity, of the face seen at last in the mirror
bringing only death.
Faux no.  Faux giammai!

Real life, operatic and cheesy, is multi-leveled.
In the moment remembered, it still drips from the mouth,
rib juice and whiskey saliva.
Illicit heat evokes the monster born full-grown
in a strip mall chain restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina.
The date is precise, an unholy cross in time:
Friday, 17 June 1994.
Between sessions of passion a couple, not the sum of
their interlocking body parts, both softened by the poundings of desire,
carrying 20-year-old lust, and married to others,
eat and drink at a table near the bar.
The woman is naked beneath her skirt
and the man knows it because he tossed her silk underpants
on the motel room floor with his teeth,
and she's left them back there because this weekend is
their private Medieval Faire and that is her token pledge
of My Faire Layde's return to the motel.
Their kisses are not yet an art but a cannibal's banquet,
consumption of the other through teeth and slobber.

There is a crowd at the bar, waves of laughter swell then mute. Over the 
bar the TV trumpets like Verdi's brass:
for OJ is in flight to the ground of jokes from the ol' boys--
That nigger could run the sideline faster'n he kin drahv that fuckin' 
Bronco!
seeing lack of speed but not the driver's powerlessness,
one hand on a pistol the other on the wheel
neither of which matters, this is a game, a ritual.

Now stop: allow a freezeframe for these few seconds.
(You don't get a choice, this is my playpen.)
This spectacle is stylized, a Medieval illumination of Fortune's Wheel,
in which OJ is frozen at the mercy of the wheel to which he is bound

and the couple observe, smile unknowingly, turn back to themselves:
for the observer (even participants become observers)
there are elements, fusions of perception
that suck images into a black hole, fix them in what Cartier-Bresson called
a Decisive Moment, meaningless, with no sense save what we impose
by creating a frame around what we perceive.
Take away one part, shift it, the structure will never again
be what we thought.

3. House Rules

If we get lucky we can pretend to transform meaninglessness into 
something we
call Art, and deal it out of a metaphoric deck.  We can try to make 
ourselves
The House and perhaps but not always we can set ourselves up to win

A pack of lies.

Discard: remove the to-others-married lovers from their barside table 
and all
the rack that's left behind is another anonymous strip mall restaurant with
blue margaritas, piss-yellow beer, and the evening news on the TV over 
the bar
starring without his knowledge Othello hurled out of a Naked Gun movie.

Remove the lovers, remove these tired Types, and they will go as interrupted
lovers will when the cop raps on the steamy windows of the rocking 
automobile

someplace else out of this writing perhaps for some other writer to find 
as he
chainsmokes, drunk and bleary in some bar, looks at the matchbook with 
Irving
Wallace's picture, reads

"Do you have what it takes to become a famous author?"

and thinks of our most famous examples: Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne,
how Hawthorne might have written the details of their trysts if he'd been
Irving Wallace and was out to make a fuckbuck, called it perhaps The 
Minister
and the Mad Housewife, because The Scarlet Letter wouldn't have been 
enough of
a tease.  But why tease, let's slip the lovers back into the deck, get them
back into the bed they'd be in--WERE in--anyway, turn this to a game (art or
adultery) so self-referential the bones are showing as though they're
fractured and protruding.

The woman's underwear is still in the cheap motel, Chaos is reordered by a
sense of Irony and

it's true it's really true what we've always heard, amor vincit omnia, and
that beyond time and space there is a continuum that breaks the frame
especially if you can have your characters act like they're freewheeling or
control them out of real life,

because maybe OJ's the famous one but the lovers are also out of real 
life and
therefore grist, I've tied weighted sashcords around their necks, 
stuffed them
in a bag and dropped them into the river along with OJ, the hungry ghosts of
Nicole and Ron, Ot(h)ello and Desdemona, Leontes and Hermione, a real-life
betrayed wife and husband, a few feral cats, so what comes out is pretty
disgusting, a spiritual blood-sausage.

Deal, then, OJ King of Knives, he too is a transportable emblem
of flight, of love gone mad, a ghost among many sewn into the bag,
he can park the Bronco by the Hertz rental cars in the motel lot,
enter the lovers' room with an operatic flail, find them
in flagrante consummatio, her legs and their voices raised
in a Hallelujah Chorus of intermingled fluids, hack and slash his way
through the juridical world of double jeopardy to the core
of a universe of offense, teach Shakespeare to high school students
(every Othello his own Iago), take lessons from Verdi's singing Moor,
bewail at the top of his vocal range the death of Love, a living emblem,
oxymoronic, exposed each day on the front page of supermarket tabloids
"Nicole Haunts OJ's Dreams!"
"Desdemona seen walking Cypriot battlements!"

The bag is not others: it is suicide, infinitely expandable, the ghosts fill
up weighted aether--not our weight, no, mine--think of it as the chain Jacob
Marley forged in life and drags behind him afterwards,

then stop the artsy-craftsy bullshit, cleanse life of toxic metaphors,
there are no OJ there are cats there is no Nicole and no Ron,
our lives are the tabloids we tell on ourselves,
not tragedies imposed from without,
nobody chronicles them, turns them into plays or operas.
Placido Domingo does not portray OJ though he probably
hit a few golfballs with him they are not even brittle
simply like being inside a lava lamp hot oil colors electricity
twisting them like some Rolling Stones song

She comes in colors she's like a rainbow

and did and oh God she was

4. Whirlpools

You're amazing he says to her that night back in the motel room but
it is not simply admiration in the words there is something aghast in him,
she is like the mirror in the bathroom into which he peered
to shut out the sound of her voice while she spoke to her husband
on the telephone, why? she asks laughing kissing him, your husband
he says I mean you were talking to him I had to call my wife from a payphone
when I was sure she'd be out

she has that enigmatic laugh and he wants her again
passion overrides even knowledge in that moment
but not the faux moment time rebuilt and owned

she knows his mother-in-law is dying in a hospital
upstate New York but there is no thought to keep him from this
she tightens around him you don't care she taunts
this is what you care about, this! yes he says.

My galleon is not charged with forgetfulness

it is pitched by the constant storm at sea
the ground bass synthesized through Alban Berg,
hopeless, trying to remain upright oblivious to caring,
the swirl the air like whirlpools,
the Renaissance cosmologists lied even if not by design
in their divisions, air and water are not separate you
can be sucked into the air sucked in by it, walk into your own
bloodstream and drown there, Berg's Wozzeck drowning
in guilt and water transubstantiated to blood,
drown in your delusions quickly as a water whirlpool drags you down.

At her bedside a few days later in the hospital room
where the woman you obliterated nevertheless has awaited you,
now she lays before you speechless, dying stares into your eyes
in the twilight, you speak idiot reassurance:
See You Tomorrow.
And her eyes see into your soul where you read
Only If You Are Prepared To Follow Me Tonight!
you are both in pain but she is ready
you are not.
There is no cheap Grace, no simple expiation,
only having to live with the wish to repeat what you did
even as you are present in the place where death
has grabbed you and forced you down to smell its breath her breath
the slow and patient movement, it has cruised its Freeway waiting for you,
it has come for you in the presence of inertness,
this woman you loved, this mother loved more than the wife she bore for you.

"Ora per sempre addio sante memorie!"

What is holy here? nothing, images, only Breughel's Triumph of Death,
the sky is lost, a song replays, stuck as it was the week before
in the car to the Asheville airport, Luther Ingram singing
"If Lovin' You Is Wrong I Don't Wanna Be Right"
this is ending badly more like "Just One of Those Things"
mixed through Berlioz' Dream of a Witches' Sabbath, every second before
her departing plane becomes a rack-drawn agony of not daring
to look at the other, if we'd thought of it of the end of it
no of course not: inarticulacy is born of soiled passion
in the departure lounge, in the anti-Pentecost
only tongues of fire, only the whirlwind, but no voices

We know how the 19th century tragedy is supposed to end

The tenor smothers the soprano discovers his fatal error sings again his
farewell to glory and to ego, knifes the ego-cancered self, crawls 
animalistic
for his final kiss but the music shapes the human end of this beast on all
fours the package is neatly tied not tired or averting our eyes we can 
look at
pain our ears can hear it, we achieve catharsis but not as we reach 
orgasm in
a Holiday Inn noisily scandalously, and ours is not heroic desperation 
all are
taken: we, OJ whacking golf balls at midnight, we pretending life is 
restored
through pain that leaves ganglia trailing on the ground like fuel cables 
for a
727 and us smoking near the fuel lines, sparks are dormant the tragedy 
is not
neat, OJ performs his literary duties according to the old book, he is a sad
domestic profile from a police blotter another song of cliches

   you always hurt the one you love
   and the waiter with the forgotten eyeglasses

look in the mirror one morning and study the face
of this almost-resurrected suicide, ghoul who has lived to tell thee
a subject of hope outside this purview,
as chords slide downward with the velvet curtain.

Bow before yourself in the mirror
but the bow is surly, snotty, graceless:
You here still, you prick? how WONderful for us all....
and there is no one to applaud but the cat who sits
on the bathtub and stares.

KTW/1996-2007

-- 
--------------------
Ken Wolman	  andreachenier.net	       rainermaria.typepad.com

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND: IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING