Here She Be — The Battlements

I am currently in a group of 6, working on a series of performance poetry pieces on the topic of pop art. Every member of the group writes 2 poems, and then we also create 2 collaborative pieces together. Hopefully, once that is complete, we will find a space and perform. This is my first contribution to the project, and most of my prewriting, which formed the poem, came from an early piece of pop art: Wikipedia Entry for Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

“So Appealing”
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new poem, bored, need more drinking buddies

“So I think poems can have short or long titles but people generally like short titles that donate some bit of charitable understanding to the poem, clarity—but not tricky like The Road Not Taken—and yes, this whole bit at the top in quotation marks is the title, just to make that clear; I’m not quoting anyone or putting my whole poem in quotation marks to signify something in particular, and I think if we all just wrote brilliant haiku as titles then we would all get what we want because haiku are short and that would make the title short and a brilliant haiku, in particular, would already have done most of the work for us.”
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“For Our Empty Handed Laureate, May He Forever Be Remembered in the Hearts and Minds of the People”
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Here are some short cubist and free-writing exercises I did for fun. I really like the first one–a bit of an homage to the David Bowie song, “Andy Warhol.”
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This is a jolly boring thing to do. Abducting new countries for Campbell’s soup. It’s War-hole. Welcome to the silver screen. Words like genuflect—War-hole as in holes. Thinking of blue. G-men buying the new art for dinner. Not War-hall as in halls. Withdrawing into double-standards. The underground. It’s always war-something. Pronounce it with me: Andy War-hole.

Sleep. Wake. Thought of keys. Sweep, swake. Opening doors. Slake, weep. All I needed was a pen. You shouldn’t have. But they would’ve had to have made it worth my while. Then the cube tilted towards me as if it were nodding. I see a confessional. Like a structure. Ziggurats and citadels for Ozymandias. Worth his while. The resurrection and the life. His statue is still somewhere. We were still in the bathroom, calm as Hindu cows, wanting nothing more than to understand what it was we were seeing.

She said it was like symbolism personified in surreal footnotes, like drugs and poppy seed muffins made a la king, a la kingdom, a la Harlem, a la pontiff altar, a la home—déjà vu and déjà de, a simultaneous feeling that you must’ve been there before but that you’ve never been anywhere like it. She told me her side of the cube must’ve been jazz music because it wouldn’t stop playing, and for weeks she could dream of nothing but sheet music where the notes were little trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, and every bass instrument that could still rumble low in her bones after so many years of rock concerts and blues singers at comedy clubs.

I felt my quill pen in its ink reservoir, spilling on the carpet, but before that moment of waste trying to scrawl out foothills or any bit of land—Bethlehem and the humming walls of Jericho. A rhythm of boom bang crash whizz biff bock and cr-shiffl-ab-ug-elho-mm-en-rock-ets-lips-latch-etsssss-ock-eth-icket-icket-icket-icket. And other sounds I cannot reproduce here because I am somewhat incapable and fear what it might do to the foundation of the building.

This is a rewrite of my Joyce poem from a few months ago. I’m hoping this will turn into a performance piece, but we’ll see. There’s power here, but whether or not I’ll be able to work it out will be interesting.

“Waking World”

riverrun,
past the burial mound
that braces against the cornfield
which has settled so nicely alongside the home
where my childhood days play together in the backyard
as I wander the servant’s quarters’ staircases
that sweep up and down, narrow, cramped,
yet suited with guardrails for the aging;
a clothes’ chute also leads to the basement,
but I have no idea where it begins,
and there is a dumb-waiter that opens only to the kitchen,
but I have no idea where it goes—
actually I imagine they both run from and to the attic,
and although I am quite certain there was once a trapdoor
in the ceiling that folded out into another set of sweeping stairs,
I must believe that it was accidentally plastered over
when the ceiling was redone

(not that it was redone anytime I can remember,
but it must be so—I think so mainly because I know
there is something missing from the house,
at least as far as I can tell,
presumably it is still there somewhere;
undoubtedly something I asked as a child,
a simple question with no answer),

which is where I imagine the tape deck has gotten to as well;
there was a recording of James Joyce still in that tape deck,
and although his brogue was so thick I could only pick out individual words

(what do you listen to my Lord? Words, words, words!),

I can’t help but recognize the brilliance in whatever it is he is saying,
and I assume he is answering one of those questions
we ask as children that have no answers,
the questions that I asked,
the questions that begged to know which way,
in, up, around, out,
and I would cry myself to sleep when I didn’t find out,
once I may’ve even wet the bed,
because not knowing meant not being able,
not knowing meant knowing
the boundaries of what was there,
of existence,
of life, which leads me to believe on that wheeled-up
and packaged bit of brown film that Joyce was either explaining,
or in the very least he knew,
where the attic is, in reference to the

New poem, has some f-bombs, and I really enjoyed writing it. This is something new for me, or rather it leans less towards poetry and I love it. Hope you can enjoy it too.

“Yup”
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