I heard Bucky Sinister read this poem at the Quiet Lightning reading series and it was so beautiful I asked him if we could publish it here.
– Stephen Elliott
***
The Gray Side of the Moon
1
Dorothy walks into Rainbow Grocery
wearing her ruby red Doc Martens.
I’m looking for the good witch,
she yells out.
Everyone
raises her hand
or points to someone.
2
I watched The Wizard of Oz on a black and white TV when I was young.
I had no idea Dorothy’s world became color once she landed in Oz.
It was long before people like us had VCRs.
Either you watched it when it came on once a year,
or you missed it.
3
At the age of fifteen,
I knew what Uzi fire sounded like,
but I had no idea what it was like to kiss a girl.
There was a weird window of time in the ’80s
when the gangs were better armed than the cops.
The fistfights stopped and the shootouts began.
Breakdancers traded in linoleum squares
for crack corners,
the windmills and headspins
gave way to jump-ins and drive-bys.
Crack
turned the streets
into a pinball game of teenagers running for cover.
Glass broke and people screamed
like the city went on multiball mode.
You wouldn’t always see who was shooting,
you just ran in the direction everyone else did.
I hid where I could,
behind cars and trash cans,
running into the subway when it was close.
I wanted out.
I wanted to leave Boston,
go back home to Arkansas
where my friends
were building hot rods one piece at a time,
and dating girls who liked fast cars and drank wine coolers.
When you’re a teenager,
it’s easy to feel like you’re going to die a virgin.
But during that time of my life,
I was really worried about the dying part.
4
I made it back to Arkansas.
I was shell-shocked
from years of street evangelism
and the violence that came with it.
None of it made sense anymore.
I quit the church for the trailer park.
Someone made me a Jack and Coke.
I looked in the red plastic cup
and saw a tornado.
5
I heard Dark Side of the Moon
for the first time on cassette.
Same goes for The Wall and
Wish You Were Here.
Later the first guy I knew with a CD player had a copy of Animals,
and I heard that for the first time coming down from an acid trip,
alone in his living room while he fucked his girlfriend down the hall.
I couldn’t tell if it was their sounds
or the sounds on the album
or the sounds in my head
and I’m still not sure.
6
they say
if you put on a DVD of The Wizard of Oz and turn the sound down,
and put on a CD of Dark Side of the Moon at the same time,
they totally sync up.
they say
that if you look in the trees in the enchanted forest,
you can see one of the stagehands
who hung himself from one of the prop trees.
they say
that buddy ebsen was supposed to be the tin man
but he was allergic to the makeup.
They say
if you tattoo your face
you automatically get a GA check.
They say
if you smoke heroin instead of shooting it
you won’t get a habit
They say
live fast die young
leave a good looking corpse.
7
The tornado set me down in California,
a world of color compared to my monotone childhood.
Jr. College was grad school for young drug addicts,
an accelerated program for learning multiple ways of getting fucked up.
I balanced my time between cocaine, mushrooms, LSD, and 100 proof vodka.
At the end of the semester I got my grades from the school in the mail.
I had forgotten about that part,
the whole going-to-class thing.
I found poets
who shot dope in the bathrooms,
smoked speed in the alley,
and smoked pot like it was legal.
They were brilliant sometimes:
brokedown angels
beatdown revolutionaries
scarfaced prom queens
glass pipe prophets
quicktounged hustlers
slowmouthed drunks
When I heard a good poem
color came to my life briefly.
There were no camera phones
No Flip Minos
If it was happening
and you weren’t there
you missed it.
Fuck Dorothy for wanting to go home.
Why did she want to go back to her black and white world?
What was she going back to?
She found the land of color and wanted out right away.
The tornado was what saved me.
Laying in my bed
coming down off coke,
my heart beating like a bat’s wing trapped inside me,
the euphoria gone,
I comforted myself in the idea
that I was too far from home to go back.
8
Every summer,
the American Tornado dropped Dorothies into San Francisco.
We were the unwashed and faded-gray version of the Lollipop Guild,
greeting them upon arrival.
This is for the little girl
who would rather have a meth problem
than a weight problem.
This is for the little boy
who tattooed his face
so no one would touch him that way anymore.
This is for every little boy and girl
who stood between home and a tornado,
weighed the options,
and took a chance on the twister.
9
AIDs took the first friends I made,
in a synchronized fashion,
one after the other,
diving into nowhere like Busby Berkley swimmers.
From there it was a variety show of ODs, suicides, and freak accidents
10
The lion wanted courage
The scarecrow wanted a brain
The tin man wanted a heart
Rachel wanted fake tits.
people gave her shit
like it was different from the tattoos
and the piercings everyone else got.
They were perfect.
The wizard knew what he was doing
when he slipped those in.
I never met a lion
but a met a kid with cat whiskers tattooed on his face
I never met a scarecrow
but I met people who shot speed and talked conspiracy all night
I never met a tin man
but I saw junkies frozen mid-walk in a statue nod
11
Fake Tit Haiku #1
I don’t care they’re fake
Whoever made them: brilliant!
Fake or not, awesome
Fake Tit Haiku #2
I loved your fake tits
fake or real they are still tits
who does not love tits?
Fake Tit Haiku #3
Silicone fakies
Saline packets too fancy
I’ll take frozen pea bags
12
The room spun above me.
I was back in the tornado,
spun by the winds of whiskey and bad decisions.
Above me
I could see the bottom of the bottle through the glass of the coffee table top.
All the bourbon that remained was one halo mockingly over my head.
The store was about to close and I was out of liquor.
Too drunk to stand up
but not drunk enough
to stop giving a shit.
I lost my faith in whiskey right then,
the same way I stopped believing in God on that hot night in Arkansas.
There would never be enough whiskey in the bottle again.
A river wouldn’t satisfy me.
I was no longer going anywhere or from anywhere.
It was just me and the swirl.
13
Rachel told me to leave the house
go somewhere and dry out.
I trusted her
I trusted those fake tits
They were at once,
a lie and the truth.
A perfect duality.
14
The house fell on Rachel.
She caught strep throat,
it turned into a staph infection, and she was dead three days later.
Rachel died two weeks after I left the punk house.
At her services,
pinhole-pupiled punks,
staggering drunks, and
bong-ripped mourners
stumbled past to give respects.
I held out for a while
went to my favorite bar
I said make it be tomorrow
and drank glass after glass of twister-drinks
one last time.
15
The first AA meeting I went to
I saw all these people from my past
you were there
and you were there
and you and you and you
16
Dorothy’s sick
kicking dope by candlelight
in the squat.
Her arms
are a mess of in pick-marks
and homemade tattoos.
An abscess stands in the crook of her arm
like a leaning barn by the side of the road
she wants to get it checked out
but is afraid they’ll amputate it.
She holds Toto close and cries,
I just want to get back to Kansas.
Cat-Whisker-Face looks up from his guitar.
Shit, girl, he says,
you’re on the wrong side of Portrero Hill.
36 responses
This is wonderful — thank you for posting it!
There’s a small misprint in section 12, an “It” divided:
I was no longer going anywhere or from anywhere. I
t was just me and the swirl.
Again, thanks: wonderful!!!
This is the kind of poem that is beautiful and new, yet is almost certain never to make it into any mainstream anthology. While moony, quasi-spiritual flapdoodle continues to be anthologized, poetry like this that people find amazing gets pushed into some kind of alternative poetry ghetto.
I have to rant about this because I feel like poetry has been so ruthlessly colonized by bourgeois academia that the sewing circle poets are the only ones who get any recognition. Case in point– Charles Bukowski. He is the only poet of the last 50 years that had a real impact on the literary scene and wrote in a distinct, endlessly influential voice. One might think the poetry arbiters would be thrilled that a poet emerged with such unique beauty AND popular interest, but the opposite is true. If he makes the anthologies at all (usually he doesn’t) it is just one or two of his more mundane poems. It’s as if they are ashamed of him. And he is clearly the most important American poet since Allen Ginsberg.
Meanwhile hacks like Charles Simic, Robert Haas, Mark Strand, Franz Wright and Louise Gluck (none of whom have any real impact on literary or popular consciousness) crank out the same derivative crap and get lavished with awards and anthologies. I’m sure many Rumpus readers will take issue because they like some or all of the above academic poets, so I apologize. But the academic stranglehold on poetry is marginalizing the art form. TS Eliot used to conduct readings in football stadiums because so many people were eager to attend! Can you imagine anything like that today?
But poetry DOES fill stadiums, all the time!
Fantastic poem. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks for this. It is lovely.
Lovely work. I’ve been a fan of Bucky’s for more than a decade, and his writing only gets better.
Wow. Just incredible, so smart. Beautiful.
Aaron, why do you care what’s in anthologies? Nobody’s making a living getting into those. You got to read this poem here. That’s enough. The people who care found it and enjoyed it, or were perplexed by it, or were upset by it. If you don’t like the academic poetry world, why would you want to buy, read, or be in an anthology? The web is now, the Rumpus beats an anthology, the times they are a-changin.
DudeG– fair point. It just kills me the way the poetry establishment is so myopic.
As a kid, I learned to love poetry by finding a Norton anthology on the shelf and discovering cummings, Pound, Eliot, Plath, Ginsberg, Stevens, etc. I just think that if a kid today picked up a Norton anthology of the last 50 years, it would be so limp and dull he would never want to read poetry again. Despite the fact that the last 50 years have given rise to amazing poets like Bucky Sinister.
But maybe the kids are all online nowadays reading the Rumpus so what does it matter.
There’s many more people reading this poem on The Rumpus than are likely to read a poem in an average anthology. Just saying.
It is nice to be lucky enough.
right on. he is such a performer that this almost becomes a different piece from the one i heard him read the other night. thanks again, rumpus.
also, bucky is featured in alan kaufman’s anthology “the outlaw bible of american poetry” http://bit.ly/fEXkxi along with tom waits, james dean, jack micheline and a whole lot of other cool folks.
Best piece I’ve read in a while. Wow.
Alan Kaufman is a dick.
everyone’s a dick if you give em the opportunity.
I’m really glad this stunning poem was posted here. The following lines are among the best I’ve ever read in describing the way I feel poetry saved my life as a kid, and saves it now, today:
This is for every little boy and girl
who stood between home and a tornado,
weighed the options,
and took a chance on the twister.
The comments here, esp. Aaron’s, are helpful, beautiful. The academic stranglehold on poetry in the U.S. alarms me, too. My friends in the U.K. and Europe chatter as happily and easily about all kinds of poetry as we do about the new Kanye album or football scores. I would give anything to make the reception for poetry here be different, be better. I am constantly trying to learn from two of my favorite writers, my fellow Angelenos, my betters, Charles Bukowski and James Ellroy, as to what to do with the really bad shit that happens to you in the greater Los Angeles area. But other poets, other angels, twisted but whirling differently,—philosopher-bards, metaphysicians, bombastic intellectuals, aesthetes, mystics, non-addicts, et al—also marched into my childhood situation and blew . . . me . . away. And “away,†twisted as this poem says it is, beats the hell out of home. I can’t thank them enough.—sxr
Jesus.
Forwarding to all my friends.
But part of Bucky Sinister’s appeal is that he’s not in the usual suspect anthologies.
Aaron: Louise Gluck’s poetry is hot, and so is she. Here’s the opening to “Daisies”:
“Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden
is not the real world. Machines
are the real world. Say frankly what any fool
could read in your face: it makes sense
to avoid us, to resist
nostalgia. It is
not modern enough, the sound the wind makes
stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind
cannot shine following it. And the mind
wants to shine, plainly, as
machines shine”
i also heard bucky read this the other night at quiet lightning. thank you for publishing it here.
Thank you,
Berkeley in the 70s
Boston in the 80s
Northern Appalachia in the 90s
kid you sing for those of us too busy scrapping and scraping by
and damn I thought that color thing in the Wizard of OZ was a recent colorized release … totally missed that it is stuck in the black and white screen of my childhood tv…….
easy on the poetry scene though beloved ones….poems like this one will circulate to the heart of things without a pretty cover…
Love you, Bucky. Don’t ever stop doing what you do.
damn.. awesome work
Liked it so much I came back for seconds.
Thanks for posting this. Fantastic poem.
I noticed the It divided pointed out in the first comment was fixed. There’s also a misprint in section 10, where ‘a’ should be ‘I’:
“I never met a lion
but a met a kid with cat whiskers tattooed on his face”
Ha, I grew up with a black & white tv and also thought for a long time that the color part was more recently colorized.
Dear Rumpus: please post Bucky’s poetry here every damn day. Or at least more. ‘K?
Ask yourself: do you buy and read anthologies? I don’t. Until I picked up the book of The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets I am not sure I’ve read an anthology since college (although I’ve heard of the outlaw bible and it’s on my bucket list).
I routinely buy books by the features at a couple of local readings (hunted one down on Alibris) because I trust the taste of the people booking and get a taste of the work. I sometimes buy poetry the way I bought computers books when I decided to retrain myself as an IT person, by sitting on the floor in that section of the bookstore reading. (In the computer book episode, it was looking up topics of interest in the index and comparing how they handled it).
I read books friends recommend, or from online forums.
A community like The Rumpus (or any of the others I routinely read: HTML Giant, LitDrift, Metazen, McSweeney’s) are the new anthologists, and as befits the age we assemble our own collections and find our own directions. The Internet makes Norton superfluous except to those ordering books for class reading lists. I’m much more interested in the class reading list Camille posted over on The Rumpus Poetry Book Club mailing list than I am in a convention anthology.
We are our own anthologists and while you might think that leads to chaos it doesn’t. It leads through community to something larger than the sum of its own parts, perhaps to new “schools” of poetry entirely based on on-line or local communities, to the ability of people outside academia to find whole worlds of poetry that might not be open to them otherwise.
Thanks so much to Stephen for posting this. Its a fantastic poem and how many of us would have discovered it otherwise.
I agree with chris c., but alternatively, everyone is compassionate if you give them the opportunity.
Nice one, Bucky; likewise, Rumpus folk.
????????????? miissss you
Aaron: Louise Gluck’s poetry is hot, and so is she. Here’s the opening to “Daisiesâ€:
“Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden
is not the real world. Machines
are the real world. Say frankly what any fool
could read in your face: it makes sense
to avoid us, to resist
nostalgia. It is
not modern enough, the sound the wind makes
stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind
cannot shine following it. And the mind
wants to shine, plainly, as
machines shineâ€
Always fun to witness
a frank poetry throwdown.
Goes back to Whitman
and the absinthe-swilling ass-fuckers in Paris
with a touch of Thomas Hardy’s brutality
and then the entire 20th century
–hipsters versus the suits–
pencils and then the keypads
blinking out secret sadnesses
and begging for love
The house of poetry has room for everybody. You may prefer Hubert Selby Jr., but he’s not the only worthy. Too bad the hipster poets and transgressive poets have so much trouble with the MFA/academic poets (and vice versa), who are every bit as fucking crazy. Sane people ignore poetry. Sane people like reality TV, the sports pages, and pop music, which has quite enough poetry for most of us.
As an absinthe-swilling ass-fucker, I have to say I am relieved when a man screams out the bloody truth as your post above did so clearly: begging for love “is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”—sxr
@sxr: thanks for the understanding
I think one of the nice things about poetry is that nobody makes any money off of it really so it’s very democratic in my view. Yeah the awards you see and consider prestigious will go to people writing a different kind of poetry than what we see here but so what?
I thought this poem was compelling and really well done. I tend to relate better to writers some people here will consider elitist hacks, but I guess my life just hasn’t been fucked up enough to really relate to some of this more legit stuff people are spouting. Oh well.
Thank you for giving this one up. I found myself kneeling a little deeper with every phrase. How I am standing on my desk, here at the end of things, I can not say. How am I able to tell you that there are latitudes, and there are latitudes. This is a global poem, the poet holds his degrees in the Black Lodge, this poem screams back at the weather of the world. Seriously, great f*ck*ng work, and thank you for sharing.
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