Secretly Ironic

Let’s just say there were only so many radicals
on the lower east side in the 30s,
more than a hundred, fewer than a thousand, and
Let’s just say they got around.

Let’s just say there’s no way of knowing
whose grandmother fucked whose great uncle,
whose children our parents really are.
Let’s just say we’re all descendants of the city.

Let’s just say they all ran together,
visited Mexico City and gladly pissed
on idols at the temple of the sun,
let illegitimate toddlers chase Trotsky’s chickens,
left town for unstated reasons at gunpoint in the middle of the night,
opened delis in Jersey and staffed them with aliens,
waved shaky arms and refused to translate punchlines.
Let’s just say they got around.

(I noodled around about the ending on this one a lot and I’m not 100% sure I like it, but it’s better than the first few drafts. It’s a lot easier to start a poem than it is to finish it.)

Rest a cheek on the warm still ticking hood
spread out your pocketfull of damp and crumbling pills
focus on the closest, on the pain points:
Too much debt, too much information,
endless defilement.
Face stained with pollen, hands blackened with dust.
Try to stand, with staring upright people walking past.
What was it you were trying to forget?

(Basically I went outside after a strategic marketing meeting and there was this old guy trying to stay upright on a park bench near work, and the contrast struck me, and I wound up with this. I’m not pleased with the fact that it’s kind of condescending, but the image of that guy stuck with me, and I think describing his raw situation with the sterile language marketing strategy works as a concept.)

Patience is the key to joy

On a platform, on a train
in the caff, in a meeting
at a desk, on a call, recall
the fortune-cookie greeting-card advice:
Patience is the key to joy.
It’s not: No pick can prize that one open.
And patience?
Unlocks nothing but delay.

You’d think that after her first two, Mary Karr wouldn’t have another book’s worth of her own story to tell. But she does.

It’s not even that the story is that different from other stories of other people: Growing out of a hard childhood, she drank too much, eventually got clean, reluctantly turned to God and slowly found some semblance of grace and reconciliation.

And yet she tells it so well, so touchingly, so earnestly.

It doesn’t feel like she pulls punches and it doesn’t feel like she’s exaggerating for effect. If I’d written that book, I’d have spent a lot more time talking about the famous people I’d been around. She banged David Foster Wallace, for crying out loud, and she would have been able to get a ton of publicity if she’d gone heavy on exploiting that relationship. But she didn’t, which is admirable.

I’m wary of the spiritual-discovery story. Wary of the whole recovery and navel-gazing thing. But Karr does it very, very well. And she’s got a lot to say. And reading her book, and the little epigraphs for each chapter, reminded me that I’ve got some writing to do as well.

So, yes. Read Mary Karr’s third memoir, “Lit,” when it comes out in November ’09. It’s that good.

The poem I was going to post this week didn’t work out. But this one did:

Central Square, Cambridge MA

Fridays at the office we’d crack beers
and bet on the living dead in Central Square.

Summer afternoons, ambo bench-scrapes ran five a day,
with longer odds for shoplifters in bracelets, unsubtle drug deals,
and badly choreographed street fights.

Evenings turned the square to silent film
scored with horn and siren. We’d name the stars
and make up lines, assign them tabloid scandals,

Find them, sometimes, in the stairwells
nodding out, smoking, reeking of piss and mouthwash
Our grim mockery and luck the only things
keeping the distance.

(They say you should never apologize in advance for a poem, so here’s my apology afterwards: It’s exaggerated and exploitative and the ending is a total cliche.)

Joel Brown sent me a link to this poem about Skip Gates, which is pretty good and which makes me think that next week I should write something about all the time I spent in Central Square back in ought-seven. God, was it that long ago?

My poem for this week still needs more work, so I’ll try and post it later. If it’s not done by Tuesday, well, I’ll just post the unfinished draft.

I think I’m going to try and write one new poem a week. It seems like a reasonable goal. And if it’s not great at the end of the week, I’ll move on to the next one, maybe come back later. The point is to achieve expression, not greatness. Rachel said this one might make me sound just a little bit creepy, but I’m OK with that. I’m also OK with the idea that this sort of thing has been done before. It’s poetry: If you’re afraid of coming across as creepy or derivative you’ll never get anything written. Anyway, here’s last week’s output, which continues the theme of writing about work and office life.

MBTA

God bless the pretty girls on the MBTA,
in skirt-suits and sneakers
their office shoes in plastic bags
swaying up the crumbling station stairs.

Every day I follow them up
outdoors up
through the park up
back indoors up
into rooms of flickering cubicles.

And while I follow and stare
they look down, tuck still-damp hair
behind podcast earbuds, turn away
from passengers, pan-handlers, fund-raisers,
and I know I’m no more alone
than anyone else on this train.