(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995)
Trained
You will ask why I never tore her down
with my famous claws and arrowed jaws
why instead I sat about, moewed,
and on occasion lept through fire.
She was a delusion I felt helpless to unspell:
a cub’s clumsy swagger, whip ticking
like a tender tail. At night I surveyed
her slumbering shape from the damp sawdust
of my cage, dreamed her palms smeared brown
with blood, licked to the pink beneath.
We paced as animals toward ritual:
each evening at our appointed hour
she lay her soft skull into the
cradle of my rancid meatfed mouth
Well, why not write from the point of view of a lion? Hadn’t I already proved that writing from the point of view of people was too easy? It was time to take on the animal kingdom. The predators. The big cats. All those poor saps in the academy, scribbling away in their rancid, meatfed warrens about their mamas and papas and dead lovers. Fuck that. I was going Animal Planet on those losers.
But unlike the predators on TV, my predator was going to be introspective, sensitive, downright emo. He was going to use words like “arrowed” and “unspell.” He was going to spend his quality time frisking the dictionary for words that rhymed with Gemsbok and Serengeti, words such as “cock” and “Ferlinghetti.”
Oh sure, my predator could have killed his little tender-tailed trainer. He could have chomped her eggy skull. But that wasn’t how the True Poet did things. The True Poet introduced such possibilities, then withheld the grotesque. And I knew this because I watched True Poet Planet every single night at 9 pm on the Suicide Channel. Sometimes it was a re-run – did anybody really want to watch Robert Frost in his “native habitat” for a third time? – and those were the nights where I was forced (forced, I tell you!) to take up my pen and climb inside the body of a carnivorous feline and emote.
Look, folks, it’s not an easy job. But someone’s got to do it.
Dennis Mahagin of Red Wing, Minnesota, weighs in as this week’s Guest Poet. Mr. Mahagin’s turn-ons include hydraulic fork-lifts and enjambment. His turn-offs are negative capability and Thorazine. He wants to extend a special word of thanks to his muse, Condoleezza Rice.
Well, who doesn’t?
“Just Call Me Bloody Mercury, Buddy Boy,”
I begged
him, I was a sweaty Klansman sans
sunscreen at Abu Ghraib prison,
this preacher’s
megaphone,
once my kaleidoscope
and lifeline, now
dispersed, becoming
nothing
but furry beanstalks
in superheated time
lapse … and more,
so much more
to my Rosy
Purgatory
than any of that,
but it’s too
freaking hot,
and I won’t fill
in the gaps.
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