Chimera Song Mosaic
Thursday, May 22, 2003
“oh, quit your stale and tedious quacking,
and your alas-ing and alack-ing
about what’s buried in the past:
sing about something else at last!” (4.32.5-8).
Pushkin told me to write odes, so’s I do what he says:
Ode on My Mama-San
At first, you might think it corny
for one such as me—
an international Mini-Mogul
to write an ode to my Mama-San,
but she’s so hot & me’s so horny,
& all the rest of this blithering world
can just go blow their nattering
nay-bobs of negativism right out their asses,
‘cause me & my Mama-San got it right,
and there’s no one in this whole wide world
who can interfere with us tonight—
no child labor laws, no Baptist upbringing,
no sisters of the worldwide organization
of Rosalynn Carter—
‘cause I am a man
out in the wide world
of post-colonial sentiment.
I am a man
far from home.
I get what I own—I make it my own.
Don’t try to hold me down;
don’t hold me back;
I have gone Native, I have
utterly, literarily gone.
Ode to Industrial Pollution
Whether the world is able to funnel its decadence
into an hourglass shaped like a virus
and is able to complete a request
for an upgrade to a hatchback;
or whether the world is able to humble its misery
into a paper bag, or a landfill, or a maxi pad;
and whether we, as its inhabitants, will be able to call
forth the chivalry and Marianismo that will render
us suitable to stuff a goose with cranberry goodness—
or to pick what’s left of the scraps of desalination
and celebrity; and make of this good again,
and make of this whole again, and make of this
pornography a meat table we can be proud of,
and make of this chandelier, a denizen--What of it, then?
Ode to Sweet Simon
Pepe le Peu has got nothing on you, Sweet Simon.
Heir to the truckloads of produce, smack packets,
& Hoffa’s legacy of pickets & whodunits.
Facile mystery, you seem to me like a smoky
cloud of rubber muscles, festooned by buxom
party girl silhouettes & shrugging off ropes
& roads of tire treads.
You bad-assed, big boy, prodigal skunk,
you owe the highways your pheromone & your funk,
chasing tail & leaving heaven in your aftermath.
Ode on an Apple-Core
for Caeli
Baltimore’s lonely this time of year
when trees lean to the seasons
is the chief reason the lonely give up their pocketbooks
it doesn’t fall far from the tree you know
when love is stuffed it doesn’t ask for an overcoat
doesn’t quibble like this: “You say dressing /
I say stuffing” over a blue-eyed breakfast
in Texas the Mockingbird upstarts
in a series of painful mocks blunt reminders
you too have lost one egg to the series
a casement of geraniums delicious
and holy and garnished by that eggshell
that fragility that regret
revealing that rip in the sofa
where you once hid your heart
