Poems by Tony Hoagland

Dickhead

To whomever taught me the word dickhead,

I owe a debt of thanks.

It gave me a way of being in the world of men

when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,

naked, goosefleshed

as a plucked chicken

in a supermarket cooler, a poor

forked thing stranded in the savage

universe of puberty, where wild

jockstraps flew across the steamy

skies of locker rooms,

and everybody fell down laughing

at jokes I didn’t understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb

and democratic as a hammer, an object

you could pick up in your hand,

and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that,

a song that meant the world

was yours enough at least

to bang on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that

beautiful ugliness always

cocked and loaded in my mind,

protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become

a beautiful ugliness,

and my weakness is a fact

so well established that

it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough

to be grateful for the lives I

never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days

back in the world of men,

when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,

hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh

was what I hated, feared

and was excluded from:

Hardly knowing what I did,

or what would come of it,

I made a word my friend.

Adam and Eve

I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that's the truth.

After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances

to the station of the hungry mouths,

from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans

to the ocean of unencumbered skin,

from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps

to the sanctified valley of the bed--

the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade

sending up its whiff of waxy smoke,

and I could smell her readiness

like a dank cloud above a field,

when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment,

the moment standing at attention,

she held her milk white hand agitatedly

over the entrance to her body and said No,

and my brain burst into flame.

If I couldn't sink myself in her like a dark spur

or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river,

can I go all the way in the saying, and say

I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Am I allowed to say that,

that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?

Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness,

just another way of doing what I wanted then,

by saying it?

Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?

Is the name of the animal power?

Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman

hurt with her own pleasure

and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man's face

of someone falling from great height,

that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness

and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?

Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside

drags the human down

into a jungle made of vowels,

hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair,

or is this an obsolte idea

lodged like a fossil

in the brain of the ape

who lives inside the man?

Can the fossile be surgically removed

or dissolved, or redesigned

so the man can be a human being, like a woman?

Does the woman see the man as a house

where she might live in safety,

and does the man see the woman as a door

through which he might escape

the hated prison of himself,

and when the door is locked,

does he hate the door instead?

Does he learn to hate all doors?

I've seen rain turn into snow then back to rain,

and I've seen making love turn into fucking

then back to making love,

and no one covered up their faces out of shame,

no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.

But where was there, in fact, to go?

Are some things better left unsaid?

Shall I tell you her name?

Can I say it again,

that I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.

As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, "Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet is seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

Rap Music

Twenty-six men trapped in a submarine

are pounding on the walls with a metal pipe,

shouting what they'll do when they get out.

Or they are rolled up in a rug in the back

of a rug truck that has wrecked.

No, it's the car pulled up next to mine in traffic

with the windows rolled down and the sound turned up

so loud it puts everything in italics: enough to make the asphalt thump

and the little leaves of shrubbery

in front of the nice brick houses quake.

I don't know what's going on inside that portable torture chamber,

but I have a bad suspicion

there's a lot of dead white people in there

on a street lit by burning police cars

where a black man is striking the head of a white one

again and again with a brick,

then lifting the skull to drink blood from the hole—

But that's what art is for, isn't it?

It's about giving expression to the indignation—

it's for taking the in out of the inhibitchin;

so maybe my ears are just a little hysterical

or maybe my fear is a little historical

and you know, I'd like to form an exploratory committee

to investigate that question—

and I'd like that committee to produce a documentary

called The Sweet Sounds of Afro-American,

but all this ugly noise is getting in the way,

and what I'm not supposed to say

is that Black for me is a country

more foreign than China or Vagina,

more alarming than going down Niagara on Viagra—

and it makes me feel stupid when I get close

like a little white dog on the edge of a big dark woods

I'm not supposed to look directly into

and there's this pounding noise

like a heartbeat full of steroids,

like a thousand schizophrenic Shakespeares

killing themselves at high volume—

this tangled roar

that has to be shut up or blown away or sealed off

or actually mentioned and entered.

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