I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra-snake for a necktie,
I got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made from rattlesnake hide,
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of a human skull,
Now come on take a walk with me, arlene,
And tell me, who do you love?
I used that as an epigraph to my poem "Superstition" --Magical
Thinking<http://www.amazon.com/Magical-Thinking-Poems-Joseph-Duemer/dp/0814250874/ref=sr_1_5/105-2115151-2458852?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188692138&sr=8-5>(Ohio
St. University Press 2001). I remember hearing the song in the 1960s &
falling inside that repeated question: Who do you love? Who do you love?
It's both a plea & a challenge. It is a moral fucking imperative if there
ever was one.
jd
On 9/1/07, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Stephen Vincent wrote:
> > Tom Mazzolini, the SF Bay Area Blues impresario, - used his Saturday
> KPFA
> > radio show to say he had just learned that Bo Diddley had suffered a
> heart
> > attack (apparently this was preceded by a stroke last Spring).
>
> Be he alive (I hope) or be he dead, Bo gave me an image and a title into
> which to fit pseudohistory circa early 2001: a nightmare I've recycled
> forever and probably shall again. And yes, like Bo said to Bo Jackson
> the athlete, "Bo, you don't know diddley."
>
> "WHO DO YA LOVE, OH BABY?"
>
> Prologue: Homage to John Webster
>
> Start anywhere. Enter through any door. No.
> Enter through my door, the one I have drawn, then
> cut from the artificial wall, the door of remembered
> insanity and my latter-day madness. Come through
> this portal on my terms or just get lost.
> Don't tell me I'm savaging the memory of love,
> pouring ice on the embers until they reek of winter.
> For I will say "Amen, amen, the natural job of poets
> is to be grave makers, but verily, I have improved upon it,
> for I'm exhuming someone else's."
>
> If you don't like my door, find another.
> The exit will always be the same.
> Everyone in here is dead. Her. Me.
> John Webster could do this in 1612--
> populate a world with the dead who'd not lie down,
> who spent five acts drinking, scheming, fornicating,
> then got 'round to catching up with themselves by
> killing each other off: husbands, wives, sisters,
> brothers, children. It was like vaudeville in
> the back room of a butcher shop. As for me, now?
> I'm not that talented but I'm at least as warped.
>
> 1. Night Of The Living Dead, June 1967
>
> Begin then. Begin with how we sat
> in the bar of a Cuernavaca resort hotel,
> lapped margaritas by candlelight
> and mariachi music after an afternoon
> in the Xochimilco Gardens, probably
> sweating out last night's cerveza fria binge,
> or whatever it was we snarfed instead.
>
> I don't truly remember the music.
> I'm less a liar now than then,
> but still you can't take much I say at face value.
> Even music by now has the hue of fabricated memory.
> I remember the candles because I lit our cigarettes
> from them and burned my hand. It's all so Now, Voyager.
> I cast myself as Paul Henreid, but through the fog
> of Sauza, Triple Sec, and gasoline I saw you
> as Ingrid Bergman, not as that bitch Bette Davis,
> which probably is closer to the truth.
>
> As long as we're doing Bergman-Henreid movies,
> cut to Casablanca: "The mariachi band wore red,
> you wore brown." Brown your hair, brown your eyes
> that flared after the third margarita--
> I slithered to sprawl by you on the banquette,
> buried my head in your tank-top, licked your nipple.
> And you, who loathed the PDA, didn't give a damn,
> instead massaged my cock through my shorts.
> We were greased at last out of the armor we wore
> and into this perfumed candlewax air, away
>
> from the 72-hour screaming-fight drive on biphetamines,
> grass, and no sleep from New York to Mexico City,
> smack into the tropospheric looniness
> of tanked-up passion, where we were almost good together.
>
> No, not quite even then.
>
> For when we stumbled back to our room,
> that is where I probably raped you because
> by then I was toting a bassoon between my legs,
> you passed out and I kept on going.
> Not that I took any longer than usual,
> I just gushed into you, then shriveled to nothingness.
> And if you'd forgotten as half the time you did
> to pop the Enovid, you could have claimed
> if you'd been Catholic a Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
> Miracle Conception because you wouldn't have remembered
> a thing of that night.
>
> Except that maybe this was really Rosemary's Baby
> and I was some stroboscopic vision of Satan
> --what I really wanted to be when I grew up--
> implanting Hell and Death in you because I had you down
> and was for one night all Power on Earth.
>
> Because I could.
>
> Because I knew the child of that night
> could be the true Significant Other,
> come back one day to kill me.
>
> Because I believed for years
> that it would be a mercy killing.
>
> Because our lives, the seasons that followed,
> were Advent.
>
> 2. Thanksgiving Day, 1990
>
> My wife hates you.
>
> Not a wonder, you are the Other
> whom every woman dreads beyond mere fear.
> You are Rebecca De Winter herself, your presence felt,
> a part of the man that cannot be dispossessed.
>
> Years beyond the event, sex is more than mere strokes.
> The creaking beds of ancient failed loves haunt us:
> and women know as men perhaps do not that Knowing
> endures beyond cylinders and pistons.
> Respectability cannot keep down the beast
> who lurks subterranean, who
> bursts forth at inconvenient moments to demand
> the full run of our private nuthouses.
> We become imperfect dangerous legends.
> I, Aeneas, who moved on to an earthbound woman,
> to marriage, children, smugness with the weight
> of a persona whose collar is a half size too tight.
> And you, Dido, a klutz who mangled her own best tries
> to whack herself, let the demons overrun
> her life, finally was brought to ground instead
> by love and marriage in an Oklahoma trailer park.
>
> Oh, but my wife hates you!
>
> She hates that I fly to Tulsa
> to sit with your husband (we are all so mature)
> after your penultimate try at a last meal,
> a main course of lithium carbonate,
> Dinner of Champions, followed by the dessert
> of slashing the crooks of your elbows with a hunting knife.
> "What the hell" my wife cries at last
> "do you want to do with a man who goes hunting?"
>
> She hates that I've given him my phone number
> so you can use it.
>
> Always this litany from an expired Missalette of lies:
> It's long over, she's still my friend,
> we went through hell together,
> we put each other through hell, she's sick.
>
> God laughs at self-delusion.
>
> So I sit, Thanksgiving morning, thankless,
> nervous and unnerved, in front of a computer,
> awaiting an unwanted family. It's 10 AM,
> I'm already back from buying the wine,
> a cup of coffee and glass of Stoli arrayed before me,
> up since 5 AM watching the sun rise like a
> fireball over the lake (Venite, Nagasaki!),
> and there you are on the phone,
> all manic sheets flapping in your own private typhoon,
> your soft voice turned to an Exorcist belching growl,
> my wife waving her hands at me like a broken semaphore,
> I shaking my head like a bobble-head doll with a twisted spring,
> you talking through it all in a parody of sexiness
> about how you are really a channel for Maria Callas,
> graphically--pistons and plugs--about
> how we made love like Maria and Ari,
> I hearing your husband moaning "For Jesus' sake, shut up!"
> and I can't get drunk enough to wipe out
> lust-memory or anger at memory
> or the screech of brakes on the street
> or my kids in the next room watching the Macy's parade
> or my wife's furious gesticulations
> or the smell of turkey mixed with your smells
>
> or the remembrance of your mouth at the end
> filled with curses at me, remembrance
> of your mouth filled with me,
> your worst insults spat out like semen made of lye,
> me a moment later beyond control desiring, entering, you
> wanting only your single blinding blind eye,
> screaming, laughing, holding you down, pouring
> whiskey you did not refuse down your throat
> to wash down the meds you could not mix,
> then gagging down the rest over the meds
> I could not mix, then plugging myself into you
> on the floor, against the wall, wherever we fell,
> praying for this at long last--Oh Jesus please,
> let it be the Liebestod!--the Ultimate Coming,
> they would find us years later,
> Quasimodo and Esmeralda passed beyond the mortal stench,
> wrapped in one another's arms, non-matter,
> non-being, non.
>
> But we weren't that lucky or there was a Someone
> who decided that one of us had to walk away.
> So the music ended, we ended, finally you ended.
> And I hitched my wagon to my ass and a star
> and followed them in a fog, dropping wife, children,
> lovers, overweighted globs of life along the road:
> except for when they led me toward the morning
> past Advent when the promises finally were fulfilled.
>
> 3. We All Fall Down, Christmas 2000
>
> Strindberg, with his Northern lack of humor,
> called it a Danse Macabre, but it wasn't always so.
> Ballet vertical, ballet horizontal,
> tango, twisted sheets and limbs,
> passion and late afternoon sunlight
> when time drained itself out through the skin,
> there were those times, too few,
> when the battle stopped just long enough
> for our bodies to sing a song of truce,
> fitted one to the other, and gold flowed
> out of me into you, you were a mine
> I drew from and refilled inexhaustible.
>
> But there was no child, not then, not of us:
> not a rape-monster, an Incredible Hulk risen
> from the Newark sewers out to wreak vengeance.
> Not even fantasy and alcohol could conjure such a being.
>
> Instead, our Advent ended with a sad, dead wreath
> floating in a puddle, and with the thought of you,
> newmade with each turning of this season,
> of two percent of your body weight on a mantlepiece,
> remembered on a cold birth morning when I knelt
> in damp socks from the life-chore of carelessly
> cleaning up behind my unknowing cats,
> then walking through a drizzly dawn, slipping,
> falling on black ice, cutting my hands
> so I looked like a well-fed, middle-aged, surviving
> version of the figure on the Cross who stared at me
> with (I'd like to think) a special kind of sadness,
> because he got to cash it in at thirty-three
> while some of us--cursed, blessed--survived even
> the nails we tried to drive into ourselves.
>
> KTW/2-1-01
>
> --------------------
> Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
>
> We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
> We'll do the best we know.
> We'll build our house and chop our wood
> And make our garden grow...
>
> Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"
>
--
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
[sharpsand.net]
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