I look at the shell, and let my preconceptions
replace themselves with others. There’s no way
I can see the shell for simply what it is.
I regard the shell and try to squelch my thinking.
As far as I succeed, it disappears.
I cannot find it. I stay unaware
of what I think I’m seeing when I see.
What does the shelled ghost of the fighting conch
think of when it tries also to see me?
‘Here’s a silver lining for you, when your faithful Fido dies:
you can ring us to come by and share your grief.
We’ll remove his corpse so quickly that you won’t be plagued by flies.
We will say a prayer if wanted, one that’s brief,
and remove Fido for burial, to your relief.’
(Once in our plant, he’s our raw material to render
with stewpot, saw, and industrial-grade blender.
Farewell, dear Pet! His soul flies to its maker,
leaving nothing of the canine’s bark or gender
in the meatballs we sell on.) Your Undertaker.
(reflecting on news story Spanish pets could be in meatballs)
‘Forgive me, for I know whom I unglue.
Scrod in Boston, gulled in London Colney.
The weight of troths plied knowingly untrue
stunt me while coughing, pulled through Horton’s colon
with broths he scarfed that glowed with snail-trail dew.
Scrod, again in Boston, on the train,
rate tape wrapped around the captain’s head.
Chips in Chipping Norton. Late-night curry
of Alsatian, sating after-hours drinkers.
Press-ganged pralines ending up as clinkers.’
(translated from the original New Bacterium as dictated by Escherichia coli O157:H7)
The affluent upper-middle-class imagines,
because they work hard, and are educated
as well or better than the super-rich,
that the two groups share a worldview. They are right:
‘deserving what one gets,’ and vice versa.
The upper-middle-class is disappearing,
(with the middle-middles and the lower-middles),
while imagining that the super-rich will notice,
and extend a helping hand to them. They’re wrong.
The rich clump them in the group they call subversives.
Competing countries had us in a bind.
Health activists complained about our glue
that gave our workers foot-death. Some went blind.
It looked like our old glory days were through.
After church one day while gazing at its steeple,
I saw, miraculous, and clothed in white,
a Royale Angel. ‘You’ve still got poor people,’
the angel said. ‘So use them. Rich man’s right.
They work ten-hour shifts. They don’t complain.
Where would they go? They’d starve without the jobs
that you control. They’re too down to feel pain
in ways that count.’ I love these captive yobs.
I call their Christian names at the Walmart store,
and know, when they fall sick, I can get more.
Cf. The New York Times article, As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester
Were I eighteen, I’d look up to John Searle.
I would scribble beer mats full of formulae,
imagining I understood his world.
With coasters scrawled with theorems, I would lie
abed for weeks while universes whirled
behind my tight-shut eyes. (I might still try.)
Mind, Language, and Society carouse
through my feverish brain which Searle asserts can’t house
my Me. He says Mind’s process, not eternal,
but something like digestion, caused by gas.
Oh beery one, Homunculus Internal,
if Searle is right, you don’t exist. Nor can you last
eternally. I thought you my husk’s kernel
but Searle says you are not. I’d fail his class.
Your counsel that I audit him is keen
advice I’d take, were I again eighteen.
Had I less age, and Searle his present stature,
I’d be too awed to bellyache and bore
on him for what he doesn’t say: re Catcher
in the Rye, the truths of blues, the mystic lore
that Yeats immortalised. Poe’s body snatcher.
But twenty years have passed, and fifty more.
A century if I’m honest, which I doubt.
Time goes elastic when My space runs out.
I wrote this on a December Tuesday sitting on the flat roof of a four-hundred-year old house in Callosa d’en Sarrià on the Costa Blanca, and, when it got cold and dark, finishing it by the open fire inside the house.
Yeats’ priest persists in baying at my moon
or is it me, too soon exposed to dogs,
who hears the curate and the canine in
each night sound starting black bats from the bogs?
I hug my hands together till the cold
they nursed in solitude begins to thaw.
I tell myself the quietly moving shade
that paces me cannot be what I saw
or thought I saw: Two moons split up the clouds.
The rift revealed the outline of a man
as tall as Yeats was, ragged-edged and wide
enough to be three men, a wagon span
of oxen boxed with Borax mules for a child
who still believes in Christmas, or in life.
And he or it, or maybe they, all float
up to the here-and-now where fear runs rife.
Some other things cry carols in the mist.
I know the tunes and no one knows the words
or even what the language ought to be
when maidens sing this while the hero girds
his loins to keep them maidens. There’s a lapse
of feeling, tone get lowered, and the breeze
is a kaleidoscope: all different songs
I hum with trepidation till I sneeze
and draw the shade’s attention. ‘It is time.’
Its words make me believe again in life
and hope to have some years of it ahead.
The moons illuminate the shade’s Buck knife;
it swings to cut my no’s off and I’m swung
up on the spirit’s back and into space,
and we’re travelling to a linen children’s book
and though its pages, to a secret place.
A golden mountain, talking sheep, a king
and wizards wearing hobbit boots appear
and disappear as pages turn and blur
my vision, or is this mist spun from tears?
‘Behold the wonder,’ a cold voice says.
‘Remember when your world was yours and new
because you thought it so, when you believed?
What happened to it when you thought you grew?’
I see his knife grow handles like a scythe,
and other stories I had stopped believing
come tumbling from an index in my head;
but, even as I cower, the shade’s leaving
and the tome is closing. Collar follows sound
and I’m between the covers of a book
as big and dead as London after hours
and Fagin steals the light each place I look.
And then a tiny toddling chubby sprite
got up in diapers gets up from a crib
and sings the song that Cher sang on that ship
and tells me, ‘Hurry, mortal! Don this bib,’
which makes such little sense of course I do
in hopes that if it’s meaningless, I dream.
‘The hope of your existence!’ Baby says.
‘What scares you so that waking makes you scream?’
‘Why do you act the mummy while you’re living?
Why toss each chance for action on the skip?
You’re courting death, impression that you’re giving
him, standing head down planning to jump ship.’
I rush to answer: ‘Baby, Sophocles
was write that knowledge brings us gnawed-butt grief.’
The sprite rejoins, ‘I’d like to help you (spell)
but time is up. You’re due to meet my chief.’
More through miasma than through guided flight
we jingle through a jungle of near bliss,
of random joys and broken toys and eyes
made large by Kohl or larger by smack’s kiss
and always Baby hurries onward shouting
‘Don’t you love it, Bubba honey? This is life!’
until the moon refocuses on lawns
where squads troop colours paced by drum and fife.
Tired out, I want to fall but find I’m prone
upon the ground and also to one-liners
and to iambic lines made of ten words
and Pentecostal virgins, dragons, Shriners
and fatty foods and heavy wines and coolers
propped full with bonefish filleted on ice.
I’m warming to my own made-up religions
when Baby says, ‘We’re here.’ I hear, ‘That’s nice.’
Those last two words reveal and introduce
a Voice that I always, always dream
I will hear and fall in love with, and I do.
Hummingbirds tongue treacle from the stars
and sing it onto Dali’s roof as glue
that anchors tiger paws in Cadaqués
while all their maws meow here at the Falls
and oranges blossom, as I turn to face
this chief muse, goddess, woman who enthrals
me, turns my leaving doubts to shouts of joy
I drink in silence, laving every part
until like heated helium I fly up
to join her in adventures of the heart.
I hope I wake before I die to write
the strange and joyous things I see tonight.
If I should wake before I die I’ll live
somewhere forever with my Christmas ‘Eve’.
Old, loquacious, lightly alcoholic
(he drinks a lot but still weighs very little)
he’s not someone to call for baby’s colic
although he’s perfect when you want acquittal
for the deadly ending to your plotted frolic.
His forgetfulness means that he’ll be noncommittal
so the judge will have to set the guilty free.
He will be your perfect witness. Q.E.D.
Earth Tourist 