Convulsing Like Baudelaire
1.
I’d love to look out on the world, its rising smoke and sinking mists,
its “workshops and their singing slaves,”
from high in my own Parisian poet’s tower, little window, little light
in the window, mid-1800s, the English Romantics dying off,
Victorian pre-modernity filling our skin, easing us in, the world so abruptly industrial,
and sinister, and familiar—
but I live in a decidedly grounded, low-roofed prairie house,
in
hovel—we figure someone hauled the thing
into town from a farm in the fifties, maybe. It’s that funky.
Floorboards unplumb, foundation shot,
and my writing space this cramped and odd-shaped “add-on”
we presume, with shag carpet no less in baby blue.
Thoughtfully stuccoed walls.
Squirrels live in the walls.
We hear them scuffling, we hear the babies.
It’s not
relaxing.
How… what? to think that, soon, referring to the “fifties”
will mean the middle of the second milennium.
It’s not that far away, after all,
but I won’t be here
to be there. I’m already gone, we’re all aready gone. Nonetheless,
I also sense
my life stretching forth like a sunny, empty beach,
all hot concussing promise—and yet
it feels as well like the far and faint and hopeless end
of life
, and yet and yet it also
feels
like we’re just plumb
smack in the middle,
looking about equally forward and back.
What’s a person to do?
How is choice, meaningful choice,
possible?
Lately I’ve decided, at the least,
to blandish, or I guess I mean brandish
my condition. Bandy with abandon
myself like an overful cup
of myself.
I’m perched on top of my own head,
squeaking orders at myself in a barely audible voice.
I’m alive like a tire in my heart.
I’m a round road where I live.
I’m a singing slave.
And I’m a,
have a,
head full of noise too dense
to discuss—call you later.
2.
Charles, can fog in truth be “filthy”?
What’s your deal with whores and hags, anyway?
Were they really all such witchy skanks, there in the filthy fog
of
gaping wrecks? One minute you’re nearly sympathetic
to their plights, and the next you’re downright phosphorescent
with excitement.
And the next you’re trapped in horror at the horror
in your head, if not at the horror outside your head,
and you know it.
Were the always foul and stupid streets
as foul and stupid as you wished them?
You gazed upon sunset
after sunset, the sun a gold dollop
that slipped around your heart, that clearly gave you painfully
ecstatic and postmodernish
vacant thoughts.
You’re like an adolescent boy, way across an ocean, circa two-thousand-or-so-and-three,
bedazzled by the gorey, shining video games
of monstrous and inexhaustable malls!
Of gangrenous and monstrous shopping bags
steering their morose but necessary course
to Orange Julius and vats of Chinese take-out!
Thick with cornstarch! Too much cornstarch!
Not even remotely
than the brautwurst shit at Snacks Are Us!
Oh delireous boredom
of multiple Mastercards,
with offers yet for more!
*
Charles, you sour, morbid soul. You sort of hysterical
number, you. Your head’s so full of death,
your ears are damn-near glowing.
*
Charles, whatever our middling, whatever our monumental
antipathies,
you are my very mentor
of the “over-driven heart.”
You walk the dogs of hell. Appalled
by the Fall, “far from the eye of heaven,”
you slink in glaslit streets and unlit ends of streets
and think.
Nichols © 2003
Draft posted for temporary viewing.